Reconstruction of the model of Vlamidir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as an Instrument of Research for Domesticity
2009
Wood, acrylic, veneer, plywood, spray
30 x 30 x 110cm
Friday, November 20, 2009
Reconstruction of the model of Vlamidir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as an Instrument of Research for Domesticity
Reconstruction of the model of Vlamidir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as an Instrument of Research for Domesticity
2009
Wood, acrylic, veneer, plywood, spray
30 x 30 x 110cm
San Francisco Ferry Super-Structure
William Dassonville, San Francisco Ferry Super-Structure, ca.1920
Δύσκολες απαντήσεις
Σε άρθρο που δημοσιεύεται εδώ στην σελίδα του Κ.Κ.Ε, και υπογράφει η Ελένη Μπέλλου μέλος του ΠΓ της ΚΕ του ΚΚΕ, με τίτλο "Ο αντεπαναστατικός γιορτασμός για το γκρέμισμα του «Τείχους του Βερολίνου»" θέτει η Ε. Μπέλου, τα παρακάτω ερωτήματα. Πήρα το θάρρος να απαντήσω μιας και κανείς δεν ασχολείται πλέον στα σοβαρά ούτε με το ΠΓ ούτε με την ΚΕ ούτε με το ΚΚΕ, αλλά αυτός είναι και o λόγος που κάποιος πρέπει να το κάνει για να μην έχουμε "μελλοντικά κενά"
1.
Ε.Μ: Αφού δεν υπάρχει ιστορική αναγκαιότητα επαναστατικού περάσματος από τον καπιταλισμό στο σοσιαλισμό - κομμουνισμό, αφού ο καπιταλισμός δεν κινδυνεύει από τον κομμουνισμό που αποτελεί ιστορικό παρελθόν όπως η φεουδαρχία και το δουλοκτητικό σύστημα, γιατί τόσος ιδεολογικός μόχθος πάνω στο πτώμα του;
Γ.Ι: Για τους ίδιους ακριβώς λόγους που υπήρξε ιδεολογικός μόχθος πάνω στο “πτώμα” του φεουδαλισμού. Τα παραδείγματα πολλά. Να μην ξεχνάμε ότι η Ιστορία μας διδάσκει ότι επαναλαμβάνεται πολλές φορές ως φάρσα, αλλά δυστυχώς με καταστροφικά για την ανθρωπότητα αποτελέσματα. Σα να λέμε ότι το πτώμα τείνει να γίνει ζόμπι, και όλοι γνωρίζουμε ότι τα ζόμπι δεν είναι χορτοφάγα.
Για αυτό μοχθούμε ιδεολογικά. Για μια καθώς πρέπει ταφή.
Αυτό το σοσιαλισμός-κομμουνισμός μένει λιγάκι αίολο. Τι εννοείτε;
Κυρίως εξηγήστε την παύλα.
Επίσης η λέξη πτώμα χρειάζεται εισαγωγικά σύμφωνα με τα όσα υποστηρίζετε.
2.
Ε.Μ: Γιατί καταδιώκονται συμβολισμοί του κομμουνιστικού κινήματος, ιδιαίτερα στις χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης, αφού «οι ίδιες οι λαϊκές μάζες τον έχουν απορρίψει, τον έχουν ανατρέψει»; Γιατί διώκονται, μάλιστα πολύ περισσότερο από ό,τι φασιστικές - νεοναζιστικές κινήσεις, παρά το γεγονός ότι κομψά και άκομψα διοχετεύονται μύριοι ιδεολογικοί συνειρμοί περί «μαύρου» και «κόκκινου» ολοκληρωτισμού;
Γ.Ι: Μα γιατί στις «χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης» υπήρξαν και τα στρατόπεδα συγκέντρωσης τα διαβόητα γκούλαγκ, υπήρξαν οι περίφημες μυστικές υπηρεσίες η ασφάλεια και γενικότερα ένας ολόκληρος μηχανισμός καταπίεσης, κατίσχυσης, παρακολουθήσεων, συκοφαντιών βασανιστηρίων εξαφανίσεων εκτελέσεων δολοφονιών κτλ. Όλα αυτά τα οργάνωσαν κάποιοι που αυτοαποκαλούνταν κομμουνιστές και οι οποίοι έκαναν ευρύτατη χρήση αυτών των συμβόλων με σκοπό να καλύπτουν τα όσα ιδιοτελή και απάνθρωπα έπρατταν.Επομένως...
3.
Ε.Μ: Γιατί, παρά τη στοχοπροσήλωση και το συντονισμό στην απαξίωση των σοσιαλιστικών επιτευγμάτων για τη λαϊκή πλειοψηφία - την κατάργηση της ανεργίας, την πλήρη εξασφάλιση του δικαιώματος στην εργασία, στην εκπαίδευση, στη φροντίδα Υγείας-Πρόνοιας, στον Πολιτισμό-Αθλητισμό, στη στέγη - η λαϊκή μνήμη επιμένει να θεωρεί ότι ζούσε καλύτερα σε εκείνο το σοσιαλιστικό παρελθόν, τουλάχιστον από την άποψη των υλικών όρων;
Γ.Ι: Κατ’αρχήν είστε αόριστη λέγοντας ότι «...η λαϊκή μνήμη επιμένει να θεωρεί ότι ζούσε καλύτερα σε εκείνο το σοσιαλιστικό παρελθόν...» διότι η λαϊκή μνήμη λέει και πολλά άλλα, ας μην τα αναφέρουμε και χαλάμε επιπλέον τις καρδιές μας.
Και στην συνέχεια μιλάτε για επιτεύγματα του σοσιαλισμού όσον αφορά την λαϊκή πλειοψηφία την ίδια στιγμή που η Ιστορία έχει καταγράψει ότι η λαϊκή πλειοψηφία βρίσκονταν στα κάτεργα. Συμπεραίνω λοιπόν ότι οι μαρτυρίες στις οποίες βασίζεστε προέρχονται από ανθρώπους του καθεστώτος. Όπως και εδώ στην Ελλαδίτσα όπου τόσοι και τόσοι «λαϊκοί άνθρωποι» ταξιτζήδες ,περιπτεράδες, εργάτες ακόμη, υποστήριξαν και ακόμη υποστηρίζουν λίγο πολύ, το "καλό που έκανε στην χώρα ο Παπαδόπουλος"
4.
Ε.Μ:Γιατί, παρά τη συγκέντρωση τόσων δυνάμεων για την προετοιμασία των εκδηλώσεων, συμμετείχαν στην κεντρική εκδήλωση περίπου 100.000, σύμφωνα με πληροφορίες μας, όταν στην ανάλογη πρωτοχρονιάτικη συγκεντρώνονται 1.000.000;
Γ.Ι: Αυτή την ερώτηση σας την απαντώ χαριστικά φερόμενος ώς τζέντλεμαν.
Ούτε τόσοι δεν ήταν, αλλά όπως και να το κάνεις η Πρωτοχρονιά είναι κομμάτι παλαιότερη γιορτή με μεγάλη παράδοση και "πολυδιαφημισμένη" σε χώρες όπως η Γερμανία δεν είναι κριτήριο αυτό για να πλησιάσει κανείς στην αλήθεια. Να με συγχωρείτε αλλά απλά εκθέτει αυτόν που ρωτά.
Ελπίζοντας ότι θα πάψετε να ρεζιλεύεστε και να επιδεικνύεται την ιδεολογική σας απελπισία, να ρωτήσω κι εγώ κάτι που σας έχουν ρωτήσει μάλλον και άλλοι «αντικομουνιστές» «δωσίλογοι» «πράκτορες» "ρουφιάνοι" και «νεοφιλελεύθερα καθάρματα» πριν από μένα.
Το διάβασα στον τοίχο τις προάλλες,
“ΤΟ ΚΚΕ δεν κάνει δήλωση”.
Εννοείτε στην εφορία?
υ.γ μας άρεσε το "χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης"
Επίσης το "γιορτασμός" εκπληκτικό
Σχόλιο του Γιάννη Ισιδώρου απο το blog http://dangerfew.blogspot.com
1.
Ε.Μ: Αφού δεν υπάρχει ιστορική αναγκαιότητα επαναστατικού περάσματος από τον καπιταλισμό στο σοσιαλισμό - κομμουνισμό, αφού ο καπιταλισμός δεν κινδυνεύει από τον κομμουνισμό που αποτελεί ιστορικό παρελθόν όπως η φεουδαρχία και το δουλοκτητικό σύστημα, γιατί τόσος ιδεολογικός μόχθος πάνω στο πτώμα του;
Γ.Ι: Για τους ίδιους ακριβώς λόγους που υπήρξε ιδεολογικός μόχθος πάνω στο “πτώμα” του φεουδαλισμού. Τα παραδείγματα πολλά. Να μην ξεχνάμε ότι η Ιστορία μας διδάσκει ότι επαναλαμβάνεται πολλές φορές ως φάρσα, αλλά δυστυχώς με καταστροφικά για την ανθρωπότητα αποτελέσματα. Σα να λέμε ότι το πτώμα τείνει να γίνει ζόμπι, και όλοι γνωρίζουμε ότι τα ζόμπι δεν είναι χορτοφάγα.
Για αυτό μοχθούμε ιδεολογικά. Για μια καθώς πρέπει ταφή.
Αυτό το σοσιαλισμός-κομμουνισμός μένει λιγάκι αίολο. Τι εννοείτε;
Κυρίως εξηγήστε την παύλα.
Επίσης η λέξη πτώμα χρειάζεται εισαγωγικά σύμφωνα με τα όσα υποστηρίζετε.
2.
Ε.Μ: Γιατί καταδιώκονται συμβολισμοί του κομμουνιστικού κινήματος, ιδιαίτερα στις χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης, αφού «οι ίδιες οι λαϊκές μάζες τον έχουν απορρίψει, τον έχουν ανατρέψει»; Γιατί διώκονται, μάλιστα πολύ περισσότερο από ό,τι φασιστικές - νεοναζιστικές κινήσεις, παρά το γεγονός ότι κομψά και άκομψα διοχετεύονται μύριοι ιδεολογικοί συνειρμοί περί «μαύρου» και «κόκκινου» ολοκληρωτισμού;
Γ.Ι: Μα γιατί στις «χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης» υπήρξαν και τα στρατόπεδα συγκέντρωσης τα διαβόητα γκούλαγκ, υπήρξαν οι περίφημες μυστικές υπηρεσίες η ασφάλεια και γενικότερα ένας ολόκληρος μηχανισμός καταπίεσης, κατίσχυσης, παρακολουθήσεων, συκοφαντιών βασανιστηρίων εξαφανίσεων εκτελέσεων δολοφονιών κτλ. Όλα αυτά τα οργάνωσαν κάποιοι που αυτοαποκαλούνταν κομμουνιστές και οι οποίοι έκαναν ευρύτατη χρήση αυτών των συμβόλων με σκοπό να καλύπτουν τα όσα ιδιοτελή και απάνθρωπα έπρατταν.Επομένως...
3.
Ε.Μ: Γιατί, παρά τη στοχοπροσήλωση και το συντονισμό στην απαξίωση των σοσιαλιστικών επιτευγμάτων για τη λαϊκή πλειοψηφία - την κατάργηση της ανεργίας, την πλήρη εξασφάλιση του δικαιώματος στην εργασία, στην εκπαίδευση, στη φροντίδα Υγείας-Πρόνοιας, στον Πολιτισμό-Αθλητισμό, στη στέγη - η λαϊκή μνήμη επιμένει να θεωρεί ότι ζούσε καλύτερα σε εκείνο το σοσιαλιστικό παρελθόν, τουλάχιστον από την άποψη των υλικών όρων;
Γ.Ι: Κατ’αρχήν είστε αόριστη λέγοντας ότι «...η λαϊκή μνήμη επιμένει να θεωρεί ότι ζούσε καλύτερα σε εκείνο το σοσιαλιστικό παρελθόν...» διότι η λαϊκή μνήμη λέει και πολλά άλλα, ας μην τα αναφέρουμε και χαλάμε επιπλέον τις καρδιές μας.
Και στην συνέχεια μιλάτε για επιτεύγματα του σοσιαλισμού όσον αφορά την λαϊκή πλειοψηφία την ίδια στιγμή που η Ιστορία έχει καταγράψει ότι η λαϊκή πλειοψηφία βρίσκονταν στα κάτεργα. Συμπεραίνω λοιπόν ότι οι μαρτυρίες στις οποίες βασίζεστε προέρχονται από ανθρώπους του καθεστώτος. Όπως και εδώ στην Ελλαδίτσα όπου τόσοι και τόσοι «λαϊκοί άνθρωποι» ταξιτζήδες ,περιπτεράδες, εργάτες ακόμη, υποστήριξαν και ακόμη υποστηρίζουν λίγο πολύ, το "καλό που έκανε στην χώρα ο Παπαδόπουλος"
4.
Ε.Μ:Γιατί, παρά τη συγκέντρωση τόσων δυνάμεων για την προετοιμασία των εκδηλώσεων, συμμετείχαν στην κεντρική εκδήλωση περίπου 100.000, σύμφωνα με πληροφορίες μας, όταν στην ανάλογη πρωτοχρονιάτικη συγκεντρώνονται 1.000.000;
Γ.Ι: Αυτή την ερώτηση σας την απαντώ χαριστικά φερόμενος ώς τζέντλεμαν.
Ούτε τόσοι δεν ήταν, αλλά όπως και να το κάνεις η Πρωτοχρονιά είναι κομμάτι παλαιότερη γιορτή με μεγάλη παράδοση και "πολυδιαφημισμένη" σε χώρες όπως η Γερμανία δεν είναι κριτήριο αυτό για να πλησιάσει κανείς στην αλήθεια. Να με συγχωρείτε αλλά απλά εκθέτει αυτόν που ρωτά.
Ελπίζοντας ότι θα πάψετε να ρεζιλεύεστε και να επιδεικνύεται την ιδεολογική σας απελπισία, να ρωτήσω κι εγώ κάτι που σας έχουν ρωτήσει μάλλον και άλλοι «αντικομουνιστές» «δωσίλογοι» «πράκτορες» "ρουφιάνοι" και «νεοφιλελεύθερα καθάρματα» πριν από μένα.
Το διάβασα στον τοίχο τις προάλλες,
“ΤΟ ΚΚΕ δεν κάνει δήλωση”.
Εννοείτε στην εφορία?
υ.γ μας άρεσε το "χώρες της καπιταλιστικής παλινόρθωσης"
Επίσης το "γιορτασμός" εκπληκτικό
Σχόλιο του Γιάννη Ισιδώρου απο το blog http://dangerfew.blogspot.com
Political Act in Contemporary : Drawing Borders
A sentence, coined by the artist Šejla Kamerić, from Bosnia and Herzegovina:
“There is no border, there is no border, there is no border,
no border, no border, no border,
I wish.”
as an art work (recently quoted in the magazine Kontakt, of the ERSTE BANK GROUP, as part of an interview with Kamerić under the title “Freedom Comes”) posits the “border” as a disruptive and imposed regulative force within the different social, territorial, and artistic conditions of contemporary global capitalism. Therefore, the disappearance of borders, as it is also precisely captured by the title “Freedom Comes” of this recent interview with Kamerić in Kontakt, is to be seen as a wish that would definitely bring freedom.
The disappearance of borders seems to be the last point in the success story of the constitution of the present world. This is the point at which its whole history, in relation to the WALL that once divided East and West (Berlin) Europe, is constructed as well. But the wish put forward by Šejla Kamerić is already operative as the logic of the historization of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Am I right? In the August 2008 issue of the Lufthansa onboard magazine, a full-page ad (page 6) by the German National Tourist Board announces the year 2009. It is presented as the forthcoming 20th jubilee, as a celebration of 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the following slogan: “Welcome to a land without borders.” The announcement goes on to say that the Berlin Wall symbolized the Cold War and the division of Germany and Europe into East and West (until 1989) for 28 years. But in the coming year of 2009, representing 20 years since the reunification of Germany, it will be possible to visit in Germany only some remainders of that time in Europe (and I would add, before they vanish completely). In this announcement, it is stated that the revolution for a better world in East Germany started in Leipzig at the St. Nicholas Church, etc. There is a very clear parallel process going on in Europe with regard to the overtaking of the communist revolutionary past of the “East“ of Europe by Christianity. It will be necessary to undertake a very precise analysis in order to identify the circulation of capital and the hegemonization of Europe by Christianity as two parallel and interrelated processes that go hand in hand both historically and currently!
I will take the border as a point of departure in order to propose the following thesis. I can claim that although we have the feeling that invisible borders prevent the space of the world, to be precise, that of the First capitalist neoliberal global world, from being open and mobile, we nevertheless have to think differently. On one hand, we see the process of the unbelievable circulation of positions that prevents us from fully accepting thinking of the space of contemporary art and culture, the social and economical, as being foreclosed by borders, and on the other, we see the disappearance of the borders that firmly installed a clear division of the world in the past, as was the case in the time of imperialist capitalism. Actually what we see is a process of the disintegration of borders, at least as part of an ideological, discursive process of the reorganization of the new Europe and the world. What is presented by Kamerić as a wish is already operative so to speak, it is already working throughout the new Europe. This is the slogan of Germany today with which it will celebrate 20 years of its reunification (which took place in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall). Therefore, there is an obvious logic organizing the whole space of the new Europe, and this means it is necessary to push a very precise analysis. Even more so, it is precisely necessary in relation to such a background, which is so cheerful in celebrating a world without borders, to push forward another thesis or logic: we need borders more than ever. How is this possible? The answer is very simple: to establish a border – to draw a line of division that would re-articulate this new world that seems to be without borders and where the only thing that seems impossible is impossibility as such – means to present, to take a clear political stance, to ask for a political act. This political act means pointing a finger against the situation that claims that today the only thing that is impossible is impossibility as such. Whose im/possibility?
But let’s proceed step by step. What is the phenomenon that can be seen if one looks attentively at the different logics of functioning within the space of politics, but even more so within the art and culture of the new Europe nowadays? We see a disinterest in the art, culture, etc., coming from the region of former Eastern Europe. This is not about being romantic or sad; this disinterest must clearly be connected with the escalation of all major exhibitions and biennials that show a special appetite for the positions of Third World artists, mostly Asian and Latin American. The past divisions and ideologies of difference within Europe are seen as an obstacle to the process of capital circulation. This means, to the circulation of financial capital as the major form of global capital today, or, to say it simply, these divisions are seen as an obstacle to the circulation of money. Behaving as though this is already one space (Europe), it is not necessary to push any inclusion through exclusion, it is enough to behave as if no differences any longer exist (China proved this with the Olympic Games as well!). We are all identical through a process of “evacuation” that David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) defines as “accumulation by dispossession.” Accumulation by dispossession is a process of expulsion from the possession of any possible difference; when it is necessary, a law is used (just think of the unbelievable legislative policy of the EU, which only specialists can follow nowadays) or there is a whole set of institutional, legislative, bureaucratic, infrastructural, theoretical, and cultural processes which are abruptly or “gently” installed. The Bologna process of reformulating the European Higher Education Area is an excellent example of this tearing down of borders in Europe. The process of “accumulation by dispossession” is perhaps no longer effective in Europe, as it is supposedly completed here (with the German slogan for 2009, it is cemented as a process that is finally realized, so to speak), but think of its workings elsewhere, in the Third World, for example.
The process of the disappearance of borders, as I try to conceptualize here, and my thesis is that the wish is almost completed (just lets think of the Wall Street collapse and the world that is falling down as a domino effect) is in fact connected to the processes of the accumulation of capital. One is surely accumulation by dispossession, meaning getting rid of, being robbed of, any difference. The second process is what we are facing today, and is called the imperialism of circulation. Michael Hudson in his Super Imperialism, from 1972 (recently republished), says that instead of there being a crisis as regards gaps in distribution, today we are witnessing a process contrary to it, which is “the imperialism of circulation.” But to come to the imperialism of circulation today, you have to be dispossessed. In 1972, Hudson already announced that the borders which were preventing distribution, forming gaps in distribution, would be removed by the imperialism of circulation. I can state that both processes – accumulation by dispossession and the imperialism of circulation – have to be seen not as a simple cut between the modes of the accumulation of capital (sending the accumulation by dispossession to retirement), but that one constituted the parameters (through dispossession) of the other in order to dominate at the present moment.
I roughly sketched out some of the most interesting moments that are part of the important debate regarding the question of the accumulation and redistribution of financial capital, which has to be seen as the logic for any serious debate of what is to be done at the present moment, regarding questions of agency for a possible emancipatory politics within/against global capitalism. It is also not necessary to repeat that this background is part of the new way that is imposed and made operative in order to think differently about borders as well. The borders are gone, and the price to be paid is the total dispossession of all our ideas, stances, and specificities. Capital has only one agenda, though – surplus value – and this is more than a program or a Hollywood film conspiracy. It is a drive; human desire against this mad drive is not an equal opponent. The imperialism of circulation without differences, as the primal logic of the condition of the production of global financial capitalism implies that what is produced is money. But as the crisis implies, this bubble will explode sooner or later as well. Last, but not least, the recent capitalist economic crisis which can be described as a process of stagflation, i.e. of differential inflation amid stagnation, is not only a sign, but also the realization of new processes of the capitalization of financial capital in connection with new modes of capital accumulation. Individually and institutionally, we can all detect the rising prices of different goods and services, which are processes of differential inflation in the middle of what experts in numerous articles in newspapers depict as the present capitalist stagnation for us laics in the field of economics (after more than a decade of prosperity and deflation!). The consequences of the crisis are still not predictable and will escalate further.
But what is important for us now is the subsequent or parallel process that is equivalent to Hudson’s “imperialism of endless circulation” and which I can simply describe, making reference to Jelica Šumič-Riha’s article “Prisoners of the Inexistent Other,” by stating that what is impossible in the world of capitalism today is impossibility as such. They work together: on one side the imperialism of circulation, and on the other, the impossibility of something being impossible. The imperialism of circulation, in its frenetic processes, prevents the subversion, the attack of any master entity. Everything circulates, is exchanged, clearly dispossessed of any difference, and no obstacles are to be seen in the network that structures reality for us. Those once perceived as enemies, from individuals to institutions, behave as if we were all in the same “merde” (to use this juicy French word for “shit”), as if we were all together, and if we all had to find the remedy to our problems and needs, obstacles, etc. (while those who generate expropriation and dispossession have to be forgotten immediately). It is almost impossible to say that something is impossible today.
Or to put this differently, in the past a subversive act was possible as it was subversion against the clear foreclosure and division in society. We had the borders. The big Other, the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures/d reality for us, was the thing giving “consistency”, so to speak. It was almost a guarantee of an intervention against it. The world today presents itself in an endless circulation (imperialism is an excellent concept capturing this drive) that is seen as “friendly” and endless exchange, and therefore in order to solve expropriation, enslavement, and neocolonial interventions by capital, only one measure is proposed, and this is called coordination. I recently found a completely serious political proposal that stated that the only thing to be done to solve our problems is an effective “coordination.” My question is, can we really be dumb enough to stick to such theories? Of course they all have an ace hidden in their pocket or up their sleeve in order for things to circulate smoothly. It is necessary to successfully coordinate the process of getting rid of a small number of those who still bother us with social antagonisms and class struggle. I am not saying, though, that there is not a need, as in the case of accumulation, for a new conceptualization and historization of the class struggle!
Perhaps on my way to Damascus with this text, I can give an answer to what was seen as a purely rhetorical question when formulated by Jon McKenzie in 2001. His book is entitled Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, where this else floated in the air, unanswered. Or else what? I will propose the following answer or command: Circulate (but just without differences)! So we have to draw a line in space, a border. To show a border within the inconsistency of the big Other, means to act. To act politically. The act changes the very coordinates of this impossibility. It is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence. This implies not only that s/he has to take the politics of representation into her/his hands, and set the border within the cynical situation that the only thing which is impossible is impossibility as such, but, as is argued by Šumič-Riha, it is necessary to build the framework as well, the foreclosure that would set the new parameters, giving the new coordinates to the political act. (Something we did when we started to publish Reartikulacija!) Within such a context, I can claim that what is necessary, in fact, is a precise, new conceptual and paradigmatic political act, which implies the setting of a new framework.
The political act is a division, the setting of a border within a space. It reconfigures, closes, or stops, if you will, the imperialism of the circulation without differences by establishing new parameters within the space. It establishes a new structure to which to relate (de-coloniality of knowledge, de-coloniality of power, lesbian and queer political platform, etc). An act is always performed through enunciation and it not only sets the parameters that initiate the act itself, but the parameters in relation to the Other to whom it is addressed, as well. What is important is the establishment of the structure to which this line(s) of division will relate. In the case of Germany and in the case of the story of a non-existent past division in Europe, it is necessary to state that the biggest profit from the disappearance of borders in Europe is to be gained by financial capital. The point is that in order to push such logic, it was necessary to imply a ferocious process of equalization and leveling of all of the strata of the different European and World societies, from the social to the educational and cultural. It was necessary to install one of the most ferocious politics in the whole space as well – the politics of dispossession – or to put it differently, local specificities were changed into ethnic/ethnographical ones, and one general path of history and genealogy from art to culture, science, and the social, was established as the only valid one: the First Capitalist World history that completely (de)regulates the history, present, and the future of the world.
Therefore, the question is always to which histories we attach our representational politics and how we resituate our position ourselves within a certain social, economic, and political territory.
The declaration of existence is the first step, as argued by Šumič-Riha, but what follows afterwards is the rigorous practices of consequences, the logics of consequences (of the declaration), where the impossibility of the foreclosure of the capitalist discourse turns into the condition of a new possibility. Therefore, in rearticulating a certain history of global capitalism and borders, I can state that the so-called 1990s multicultural ideology of global neoliberal capitalism was the declaration of the existence of other worlds, but only and solely for the installment of a second step, which is the iron logic of the imperialism of circulation. In order to do this, an accelerated process of dispossession was put to work, which cleaned and evacuated each and every difference. These two stages are excellently captured in the field of contemporary art by a project I already mentioned several times and undertook an analysis of in the past. In the 1990s, Mladen Stilinović declared that “An artist who can not speak English is NO artist.” This sentence, as an art work, depicted the initial multicultural logic of the neoliberal global capitalism of the 1990s excellently. It was an interest in a specificity that had to use the “common language” of translation regardless, and at that time it seemed that it did not matter how good it was. A decade afterwards, in 2007, I proposed a correction of this sentence as an art work: “An artist who can not speak English WELL is NO artist.” This is the new process of dispossession and difference, and the process of emptying the world of any content and political action. It is a formalization and equalization of positions that allows easy circulation.
A political act is that which interrupts a situation where the only impossible thing in the world today is impossibility as such.
Text by Marina Gržinić
References:
Marina Gržinić, Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005.
Michael Hudson, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Austin, Texas, Holt Rinehart 1972.
Jelica Šumič-Riha, “Jetniki Drugega, ki ne obstaja” (Prisoners of the Inexistent Other), in Filozofski vestnik/Acta Philosophica, journal, published by the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana 2007.
Source : REARTIKULACIJA no. 5 - 2008
“There is no border, there is no border, there is no border,
no border, no border, no border,
I wish.”
as an art work (recently quoted in the magazine Kontakt, of the ERSTE BANK GROUP, as part of an interview with Kamerić under the title “Freedom Comes”) posits the “border” as a disruptive and imposed regulative force within the different social, territorial, and artistic conditions of contemporary global capitalism. Therefore, the disappearance of borders, as it is also precisely captured by the title “Freedom Comes” of this recent interview with Kamerić in Kontakt, is to be seen as a wish that would definitely bring freedom.
The disappearance of borders seems to be the last point in the success story of the constitution of the present world. This is the point at which its whole history, in relation to the WALL that once divided East and West (Berlin) Europe, is constructed as well. But the wish put forward by Šejla Kamerić is already operative as the logic of the historization of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Am I right? In the August 2008 issue of the Lufthansa onboard magazine, a full-page ad (page 6) by the German National Tourist Board announces the year 2009. It is presented as the forthcoming 20th jubilee, as a celebration of 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the following slogan: “Welcome to a land without borders.” The announcement goes on to say that the Berlin Wall symbolized the Cold War and the division of Germany and Europe into East and West (until 1989) for 28 years. But in the coming year of 2009, representing 20 years since the reunification of Germany, it will be possible to visit in Germany only some remainders of that time in Europe (and I would add, before they vanish completely). In this announcement, it is stated that the revolution for a better world in East Germany started in Leipzig at the St. Nicholas Church, etc. There is a very clear parallel process going on in Europe with regard to the overtaking of the communist revolutionary past of the “East“ of Europe by Christianity. It will be necessary to undertake a very precise analysis in order to identify the circulation of capital and the hegemonization of Europe by Christianity as two parallel and interrelated processes that go hand in hand both historically and currently!
I will take the border as a point of departure in order to propose the following thesis. I can claim that although we have the feeling that invisible borders prevent the space of the world, to be precise, that of the First capitalist neoliberal global world, from being open and mobile, we nevertheless have to think differently. On one hand, we see the process of the unbelievable circulation of positions that prevents us from fully accepting thinking of the space of contemporary art and culture, the social and economical, as being foreclosed by borders, and on the other, we see the disappearance of the borders that firmly installed a clear division of the world in the past, as was the case in the time of imperialist capitalism. Actually what we see is a process of the disintegration of borders, at least as part of an ideological, discursive process of the reorganization of the new Europe and the world. What is presented by Kamerić as a wish is already operative so to speak, it is already working throughout the new Europe. This is the slogan of Germany today with which it will celebrate 20 years of its reunification (which took place in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall). Therefore, there is an obvious logic organizing the whole space of the new Europe, and this means it is necessary to push a very precise analysis. Even more so, it is precisely necessary in relation to such a background, which is so cheerful in celebrating a world without borders, to push forward another thesis or logic: we need borders more than ever. How is this possible? The answer is very simple: to establish a border – to draw a line of division that would re-articulate this new world that seems to be without borders and where the only thing that seems impossible is impossibility as such – means to present, to take a clear political stance, to ask for a political act. This political act means pointing a finger against the situation that claims that today the only thing that is impossible is impossibility as such. Whose im/possibility?
But let’s proceed step by step. What is the phenomenon that can be seen if one looks attentively at the different logics of functioning within the space of politics, but even more so within the art and culture of the new Europe nowadays? We see a disinterest in the art, culture, etc., coming from the region of former Eastern Europe. This is not about being romantic or sad; this disinterest must clearly be connected with the escalation of all major exhibitions and biennials that show a special appetite for the positions of Third World artists, mostly Asian and Latin American. The past divisions and ideologies of difference within Europe are seen as an obstacle to the process of capital circulation. This means, to the circulation of financial capital as the major form of global capital today, or, to say it simply, these divisions are seen as an obstacle to the circulation of money. Behaving as though this is already one space (Europe), it is not necessary to push any inclusion through exclusion, it is enough to behave as if no differences any longer exist (China proved this with the Olympic Games as well!). We are all identical through a process of “evacuation” that David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) defines as “accumulation by dispossession.” Accumulation by dispossession is a process of expulsion from the possession of any possible difference; when it is necessary, a law is used (just think of the unbelievable legislative policy of the EU, which only specialists can follow nowadays) or there is a whole set of institutional, legislative, bureaucratic, infrastructural, theoretical, and cultural processes which are abruptly or “gently” installed. The Bologna process of reformulating the European Higher Education Area is an excellent example of this tearing down of borders in Europe. The process of “accumulation by dispossession” is perhaps no longer effective in Europe, as it is supposedly completed here (with the German slogan for 2009, it is cemented as a process that is finally realized, so to speak), but think of its workings elsewhere, in the Third World, for example.
The process of the disappearance of borders, as I try to conceptualize here, and my thesis is that the wish is almost completed (just lets think of the Wall Street collapse and the world that is falling down as a domino effect) is in fact connected to the processes of the accumulation of capital. One is surely accumulation by dispossession, meaning getting rid of, being robbed of, any difference. The second process is what we are facing today, and is called the imperialism of circulation. Michael Hudson in his Super Imperialism, from 1972 (recently republished), says that instead of there being a crisis as regards gaps in distribution, today we are witnessing a process contrary to it, which is “the imperialism of circulation.” But to come to the imperialism of circulation today, you have to be dispossessed. In 1972, Hudson already announced that the borders which were preventing distribution, forming gaps in distribution, would be removed by the imperialism of circulation. I can state that both processes – accumulation by dispossession and the imperialism of circulation – have to be seen not as a simple cut between the modes of the accumulation of capital (sending the accumulation by dispossession to retirement), but that one constituted the parameters (through dispossession) of the other in order to dominate at the present moment.
I roughly sketched out some of the most interesting moments that are part of the important debate regarding the question of the accumulation and redistribution of financial capital, which has to be seen as the logic for any serious debate of what is to be done at the present moment, regarding questions of agency for a possible emancipatory politics within/against global capitalism. It is also not necessary to repeat that this background is part of the new way that is imposed and made operative in order to think differently about borders as well. The borders are gone, and the price to be paid is the total dispossession of all our ideas, stances, and specificities. Capital has only one agenda, though – surplus value – and this is more than a program or a Hollywood film conspiracy. It is a drive; human desire against this mad drive is not an equal opponent. The imperialism of circulation without differences, as the primal logic of the condition of the production of global financial capitalism implies that what is produced is money. But as the crisis implies, this bubble will explode sooner or later as well. Last, but not least, the recent capitalist economic crisis which can be described as a process of stagflation, i.e. of differential inflation amid stagnation, is not only a sign, but also the realization of new processes of the capitalization of financial capital in connection with new modes of capital accumulation. Individually and institutionally, we can all detect the rising prices of different goods and services, which are processes of differential inflation in the middle of what experts in numerous articles in newspapers depict as the present capitalist stagnation for us laics in the field of economics (after more than a decade of prosperity and deflation!). The consequences of the crisis are still not predictable and will escalate further.
But what is important for us now is the subsequent or parallel process that is equivalent to Hudson’s “imperialism of endless circulation” and which I can simply describe, making reference to Jelica Šumič-Riha’s article “Prisoners of the Inexistent Other,” by stating that what is impossible in the world of capitalism today is impossibility as such. They work together: on one side the imperialism of circulation, and on the other, the impossibility of something being impossible. The imperialism of circulation, in its frenetic processes, prevents the subversion, the attack of any master entity. Everything circulates, is exchanged, clearly dispossessed of any difference, and no obstacles are to be seen in the network that structures reality for us. Those once perceived as enemies, from individuals to institutions, behave as if we were all in the same “merde” (to use this juicy French word for “shit”), as if we were all together, and if we all had to find the remedy to our problems and needs, obstacles, etc. (while those who generate expropriation and dispossession have to be forgotten immediately). It is almost impossible to say that something is impossible today.
Or to put this differently, in the past a subversive act was possible as it was subversion against the clear foreclosure and division in society. We had the borders. The big Other, the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures/d reality for us, was the thing giving “consistency”, so to speak. It was almost a guarantee of an intervention against it. The world today presents itself in an endless circulation (imperialism is an excellent concept capturing this drive) that is seen as “friendly” and endless exchange, and therefore in order to solve expropriation, enslavement, and neocolonial interventions by capital, only one measure is proposed, and this is called coordination. I recently found a completely serious political proposal that stated that the only thing to be done to solve our problems is an effective “coordination.” My question is, can we really be dumb enough to stick to such theories? Of course they all have an ace hidden in their pocket or up their sleeve in order for things to circulate smoothly. It is necessary to successfully coordinate the process of getting rid of a small number of those who still bother us with social antagonisms and class struggle. I am not saying, though, that there is not a need, as in the case of accumulation, for a new conceptualization and historization of the class struggle!
Perhaps on my way to Damascus with this text, I can give an answer to what was seen as a purely rhetorical question when formulated by Jon McKenzie in 2001. His book is entitled Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, where this else floated in the air, unanswered. Or else what? I will propose the following answer or command: Circulate (but just without differences)! So we have to draw a line in space, a border. To show a border within the inconsistency of the big Other, means to act. To act politically. The act changes the very coordinates of this impossibility. It is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence. This implies not only that s/he has to take the politics of representation into her/his hands, and set the border within the cynical situation that the only thing which is impossible is impossibility as such, but, as is argued by Šumič-Riha, it is necessary to build the framework as well, the foreclosure that would set the new parameters, giving the new coordinates to the political act. (Something we did when we started to publish Reartikulacija!) Within such a context, I can claim that what is necessary, in fact, is a precise, new conceptual and paradigmatic political act, which implies the setting of a new framework.
The political act is a division, the setting of a border within a space. It reconfigures, closes, or stops, if you will, the imperialism of the circulation without differences by establishing new parameters within the space. It establishes a new structure to which to relate (de-coloniality of knowledge, de-coloniality of power, lesbian and queer political platform, etc). An act is always performed through enunciation and it not only sets the parameters that initiate the act itself, but the parameters in relation to the Other to whom it is addressed, as well. What is important is the establishment of the structure to which this line(s) of division will relate. In the case of Germany and in the case of the story of a non-existent past division in Europe, it is necessary to state that the biggest profit from the disappearance of borders in Europe is to be gained by financial capital. The point is that in order to push such logic, it was necessary to imply a ferocious process of equalization and leveling of all of the strata of the different European and World societies, from the social to the educational and cultural. It was necessary to install one of the most ferocious politics in the whole space as well – the politics of dispossession – or to put it differently, local specificities were changed into ethnic/ethnographical ones, and one general path of history and genealogy from art to culture, science, and the social, was established as the only valid one: the First Capitalist World history that completely (de)regulates the history, present, and the future of the world.
Therefore, the question is always to which histories we attach our representational politics and how we resituate our position ourselves within a certain social, economic, and political territory.
The declaration of existence is the first step, as argued by Šumič-Riha, but what follows afterwards is the rigorous practices of consequences, the logics of consequences (of the declaration), where the impossibility of the foreclosure of the capitalist discourse turns into the condition of a new possibility. Therefore, in rearticulating a certain history of global capitalism and borders, I can state that the so-called 1990s multicultural ideology of global neoliberal capitalism was the declaration of the existence of other worlds, but only and solely for the installment of a second step, which is the iron logic of the imperialism of circulation. In order to do this, an accelerated process of dispossession was put to work, which cleaned and evacuated each and every difference. These two stages are excellently captured in the field of contemporary art by a project I already mentioned several times and undertook an analysis of in the past. In the 1990s, Mladen Stilinović declared that “An artist who can not speak English is NO artist.” This sentence, as an art work, depicted the initial multicultural logic of the neoliberal global capitalism of the 1990s excellently. It was an interest in a specificity that had to use the “common language” of translation regardless, and at that time it seemed that it did not matter how good it was. A decade afterwards, in 2007, I proposed a correction of this sentence as an art work: “An artist who can not speak English WELL is NO artist.” This is the new process of dispossession and difference, and the process of emptying the world of any content and political action. It is a formalization and equalization of positions that allows easy circulation.
A political act is that which interrupts a situation where the only impossible thing in the world today is impossibility as such.
Text by Marina Gržinić
References:
Marina Gržinić, Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005.
Michael Hudson, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Austin, Texas, Holt Rinehart 1972.
Jelica Šumič-Riha, “Jetniki Drugega, ki ne obstaja” (Prisoners of the Inexistent Other), in Filozofski vestnik/Acta Philosophica, journal, published by the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana 2007.
Source : REARTIKULACIJA no. 5 - 2008
Monday, November 16, 2009
Cellphones, Texts and Lovers
Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex. (He meets one Midwestern couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s.)
But the most interesting part of the diaries concerns the way cellphones have influenced courtship. On nights when they are out, the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement.
As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.”
Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, “everyone is on somebody’s back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts.”
The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don’t want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. “Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries,” a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. “I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands,” a TV producer writes. “He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond.”
People who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans. But the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans. It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution.
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.
People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.
It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.
It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
Text by David Brooks
The New York Times November 3, 2009
But the most interesting part of the diaries concerns the way cellphones have influenced courtship. On nights when they are out, the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement.
As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.”
Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, “everyone is on somebody’s back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts.”
The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don’t want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. “Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries,” a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. “I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands,” a TV producer writes. “He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond.”
People who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans. But the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans. It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution.
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.
People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.
It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.
It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
Text by David Brooks
The New York Times November 3, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
Masculine Style Dinning Room
Masculine style dinning room from "Our Homes and How to Beautify Them", H.J Jennings, 1892.
Ingestion / Anti-pasta
Here is a photo of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti eating a plate of spaghetti in 1930. What looks like an anodyne photograph was in fact a highly loaded image, for this was the man who, together with his younger colleague Fillia (the pseudonym of Luiggi Colombo), had just published the "Manifesto of Futurist Cookery" (1930), which dared declare anathema Italy's sacrosanct pasta. Marinetti saw the Italian table as weighted down by heavy traditional food. The English might be content with their dried cod, roast beef, and pudding, the Germans with their sauerkraut, smoked bacon, and sausages, but for the Italians pasta would no longer do. Marinetti wanted to reverse the best-known chapter of the history of Italian cuisine. In the 17th century, the city of Naples had initiated a gastronomic revolution whereby its inhabitants, until then known as mangiabroccoli and mangiafoglie, now became mangiamaccheroni. The pasta eater, holding the spaghetti in his hands above his mouth, became a stock figure, like the characters of Commedia dell'Arte, disseminated in prints all over Europe. Now the Futurists were calling for the abolition of what they deemed an absurd Italian gastronomic religion. Marshalling the opinions of doctors, professors, hygienists, and impostors, Marinetti claimed that pasta induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism. In short, pasta stood behind everything the Futurists had been battling ever since the appearance of their initial manifesto in 1909.
They lamented that pastasciutta—dried pasta of the sort we all eat—was 40 percent less nutritious than meat, fish, and vegetables. Mixing scientific data with poetic flights of eloquence, Marinetti held that pasta ensnared Italians within the slow looms of Penelope and bound them to the sailing ships somnolently awaiting a gust of wind on a sleepy Mediterranean. Being anti-pasta meant being antipassatista, i.e., against the past.
Predictably, upon its publication in the Turin daily Gazetta del Popolo on 28 December 1930, and its translation in the Parisian daily Comoedia a few months later, the manifesto provoked an uproar. Delighted to have finally managed to write a manifesto that, in line with Futurism's intent to transform every aspect of life, had finally hit on the one realm of the quotidian that affected every single Italian, Marinetti and Fillia gleefully devoted a whole section of their 1932 Futurist Cookbook to recording the blistering effects of the initial cooking manifesto. In typical Futurist fashion, the section containing the polemic preceded the section with the actual recipes. Marinetti and Fillia claimed, in equally characteristic Futurist inflationary style, that the pros and cons of pasta were endlessly debated in the Italian press in hundreds of articles by writers, politicians, chemists, and famous cooks, not to mention innumerable cartoons. Meanwhile, foreign publications from London to Budapest, from Tunis to Tokyo, and all the way to Sydney had announced somewhat incredulously that Italy was about to abandon spaghetti. In the city of l'Aquila (a few hours from the Italian capital) women had taken the situation into their own hands by signing a collective letter of indignation, addressed to Marinetti, in favor of pasta. In Genoa, an association called P.I.P.A., an acronym for International Association Against Pasta, was formed. Thousands of miles away in San Francisco, a fight had erupted between two Italian restaurants situated on different floors of the same building. While the head cook of the Savoia, Italy's royal family, actually came out against pasta, the mayor of Naples professed that vermicelli with tomato sauce was the food of the angels. To which Marinetti responded that if that were the case, it simply served to confirm the boredom of life in paradise.
Ultimately, Marinetti believed, modern science would allow us to replace food with free, state-sponsored pills composed of albumins, synthetic fats, and vitamins that would lower prices for the consumer and lessen the toll of labor on the worker. Ultraviolet lamps could be used to electrify and thus dynamize food staples. Eventually, a totally mechanized production would relieve humankind of labor altogether, allowing man to be at leisure to pursue nobler activities. Dining could thus become a purely aesthetic enterprise. On this premise, Marinetti and Fillia's proposals for the new Italian cuisine constitute one of the most inspired chapters in the annals of Futurism. The cookbook gave a new infusion of giovinezza—a favorite Fascist word, meaning "youth"—to the slightly tired antics of a movement now known as Secondo Futurismo. While the spectator could already expect, by the 1930s, to be abused by the Futurist text, the Futurist painting, the Futurist polimaterico (multimedia sculpture), and the Futurist performance, here the abuse went not to the head, but straight to the stomach.
The polemics in The Futurist Cookbook were followed by an elaborate account of some Futurist banquets. One of the more memorable of these Aeropranzi futuristi was a banquet for 300 people held on 18 December 1931 at the Hotel Negrino in Chiavari. Guests were delighted and terrified as they braced themselves to ingest dishes prepared by the famous cook Bulgheroni, who had come especially from Milan to this small Ligurian town to preside in the kitchen over the burial of pastasciutta. Although the Futurists had advocated the abolition of eloquence and politics around the table, the guests nevertheless first had to sit through a lecture by Marinetti on the state of world Futurism. Afterward, the meal began with a flan of calf's head seated on a bed of pineapple, nuts, and dates, stuffed—oh, surprise!—with anchovies. Then, to cleanse the palate, Bulgheroni served a decollapalato (a pun on decollare, meaning "to get off the ground"), a lyrical concoction of meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals. The main dish was beef in carlinga (another aeronautic term, probably referring to a kind of Dutch oven), meatballs—whose composition was best left uninvestigated—placed over airplanes made out of bread crumbs. After a few more dishes the dessert, named eletricita atmosferische candite, arrived, consisting of colorful little cubes made of fake marble crowned with cotton candy that enclosed a sweetish paste containing ingredients only a long chemical analysis could disclose. Not everybody made it to the end of the dinner.
Most memorable among other Futurist recipes was the carneplastico: a synthetic sculptural interpretation of Futurist aeropittura referring to the much-beloved Italian landscape. In honor of the beacon of Italian industry, one could taste the pollo Fiat, a stuffed chicken placed on puffy pillows of whipped cream. On a more pornographic note, one could also have a porco eccittato, a cooked salami placed vertically on the plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.
Whatever Marinetti might have thought about his capacities for perennial transgression, such conceits of dishes as "divine surprises" had a long historical lineage. They went back to the most extraordinary passages in Petronius Arbitrius's Satiricon, thus reviving an aspect of Romanita that the Fascists, in their eagerness to revive Roman glories, would have been all too happy to endorse. Indeed, many of the ingredients were coded so that the exotic fruits that appear in so many Futurist dishes were meant to evoke Italy's hope for a firmer grip on North Africa in fulfillment of its imperial ambitions as master of the Mediterranean. There was, it turns out, some disagreement during the Fascist ventennio as to the uer-history of pasta. According to the story presently told in Rome's Museo Nazionale della Pasta Alimentare (the only such museum in the world, founded in the 1990s), traces of early pasta implements were found in the archeological remains of the Etruscan town of Cerveteri, near Rome, dating to the 4th century BC. Pasta was also identified in low reliefs of the 12th century. And yet the writer Paolo Buzzi, in an article printed in 1930 in the much-venerated journal La Cucina Italiana, pointed to the fact that no mention of pasta by the ancient Romans could be found in the history of Italian cooking by d'Apico, the Homer of cooking. This might sound strange, he added, if one thinks of the thousand stories one was told as a child about the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Pompeii, one of which told of plates, still filled with maccheroni, thrown into the lava.
As always with Futurism, Marinetti's ottimismo della tavola had its darker side in the realm of realpolitik. Not by chance, as he himself acknowledged in the manifesto, Marinetti launched his attack against pasta just when Italy, hit hard by the Depression, was struggling to achieve one of Mussolini's great dreams: autarchy, or the elimination of Italy's economic dependence on foreign markets. Pasta, quintessentially Italian as it was, depended on expensive imports of wheat. The regime thus launched a campaign in favor of home-grown rice as a better substitute. Rice, we are told, was more virile, more patriotic, and more suitable for fighters and heroes. Rice also had its part in the history of Italian cooking as the great rival of pasta; it came from the Po valley in the industrial North, while pasta, with its hypothetical birthplace in Etruria and its triumph in Naples, was identified with the center, and even more with the agrarian and backward South. This was a battle that could thus be waged on familiar Futurist geopolitical territory.
And so the Futurists offered tuttoriso: new dishes to replace the traditional Northern risotto. More sinister is the fact that among the doctors summoned by Marinetti was the eugenicist Nicola Pende, the man behind the new Instituto di Biotipologia in Rome. Marinetti's attacks against pasta coincided, significantly I think, with the first wave of Taylorization of pasta production. On display in the Museo della Pasta in Rome are vintage photographs of women (almost never men) at work in front of vertical hydraulic presses, grinders, cutters, and blenders that look no less impressive, no less daunting, and no less alienating, than the assembly line at Fiat's famous Turin factory known as the Lingotto, a Futurist favorite back in the teens. By the 1930s, the institution of biotypes as substitutes for Taylorism to attain maximal efficiency in the working place and the provision of a master race had taken hold of the Fascist imagination. Thus the New Futurist Man, the man without pasta, the homo ludens who might eventually replace homo edens, the man whom one may be tempted to theorize as the postmodern "desiring machine" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, was, then, first and foremost, the New Fascist Man.
Fine. But what is one to make of our Marinetti snapshot? The staple photograph we see reproduced shows Marinetti instructing a female cook on how to concoct one of his recipes, both of them standing in front of a 1913 Muscular Dynamism painted by Umberto Boccioni. So is our photograph here of Marinetti caught red-handed in the act of eating the infamous dish? A good Italian who just couldn't resist? And this taking place at Biffi, if one is to believe the caption, one of the best-known Milanese establishments (still in existence) and a favorite haunt of the Futurists? Or is it a clever maneuver by Marinetti intended to bamboozle the viewer, leave him or her guessing, spinning yet still more controversy? About to send off my text and still wavering between these two interpretations of this piece of photographic evidence, I stumbled on one little paragraph of The Futurist Cookbook. There, entry number 7 in a short section on apocryphal anecdotes provided a possible answer: "Photographs of Marinetti in the act of eating pasta appeared in a few mass-circulation magazines: they were photographic montages carried out by experts hostile to Futurist cuisine, who were trying to discredit the campaign for a new way of eating."1 There could, however, be another reading: the photo is real and Marinetti, whatever he might have claimed in his cookbook, was simply lying about the montage. There must have been moments when, even for Marinetti, the desires of the everyman vanquished those of the Futurist and the Fascist in him.
1 — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), p. 99.
Text by Romy Golan
Source: Cabinet magazine, Issue 10, Spring 2003
Monday, November 2, 2009
M'Zab Valley
A traditional human habitat, created in the 10th century by the Ibadites around their five ksour (fortified cities), has been preserved intact in the M’Zab valley. Simple, functional and perfectly adapted to the environment, the architecture of M’Zab was designed for community living,while respecting the structure of the family.
Algeria, 4000.0000 haWilaya (province) of Ghardaia
After a Death
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Bly
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Bly
Central Hotel in Uriage-Les-Bains
Pierre Bonnard in his Room at the Central Hotel in Uriage-Les-Bains, photography by George Besson, 1918
The World as Stage
Streets, squares, parks, supermarkets, Internet portals, and other sites have become stages of urban life that allow us to display our everyday actions and behaviors. Many artists today work with the theatrical aspect of staging the self in everyday life. The question of the theatrical has taken on a new relevance due to the multiple forms of self-staging and lifestyle. If everyone plays the main role in his or her own lifestyle film, what is the role of art? The exhibition Die Welt als Bühne (The World as Stage) uses the increasing trend towards lifestyle theater as an opportunity to confront ourselves with alternative life models and to show how existing forms of self-staging can be reinterpreted in an emancipatory fashion.
In their work, the participating artists mediate among art, media staging, and real life. In the exhibition, stages are created (Tilman Wendland) to show collective forms of acting (Mads Lynnerup, Jan Northoff), or interaction takes place with already exiting platforms for performance (Jan Mančuška, Carey Young). The exhibition is a combination of performance, video, photography, as well as the stagings of virtual and architectural platforms that challenge in performative terms existing conventions of the theatrical.
Curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen (Kopenhagen/Berlin)
Artists: Tamy Ben-Tor, Claus Carstensen/Peter Bonde/Thomas Andersen, Mads Lynnerup, Jan Mančuška, HuskMitNavn, Jan Northoff, Tilman Wendland, Carey Young
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k.
November 21, 2009 - January 10, 2010
In their work, the participating artists mediate among art, media staging, and real life. In the exhibition, stages are created (Tilman Wendland) to show collective forms of acting (Mads Lynnerup, Jan Northoff), or interaction takes place with already exiting platforms for performance (Jan Mančuška, Carey Young). The exhibition is a combination of performance, video, photography, as well as the stagings of virtual and architectural platforms that challenge in performative terms existing conventions of the theatrical.
Curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen (Kopenhagen/Berlin)
Artists: Tamy Ben-Tor, Claus Carstensen/Peter Bonde/Thomas Andersen, Mads Lynnerup, Jan Mančuška, HuskMitNavn, Jan Northoff, Tilman Wendland, Carey Young
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k.
November 21, 2009 - January 10, 2010
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Story
Magic lantern slide created in the 1930s and distributed around
the world to educate people about Japan.
Source : www.pinktentacle.com
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Fireflies
Before you loved me,
we played Scrabble in Dainohara Park
beside a small lake covered in lily pads.
I take ages on my turn, calculating,
and catch you staring out over the water,
hands clasped around the lingering warmth
of your vending machine Royal Milk Tea.
I lay down the tiles for “SPARKLE.” Seven letters.
“Impressive,” you mutter, and grinning
I wrestle new letters from the bag.
Our hands pass more rapidly
over the board. You set M beside E.
and I put U beside versatile S
until there are no words left
and the afternoon has faded into night.
It is the first time I beat you.
Later, we search for fireflies in the darkness
and find them, like shooting stars.
We tread off the lit paths and cast
our bodies into one another – in a gazebo,
against the cold painted steel of a playground slide,
tangled in a tire swing dangling from an old pine.
I think you love me then.
Aiko Harman
we played Scrabble in Dainohara Park
beside a small lake covered in lily pads.
I take ages on my turn, calculating,
and catch you staring out over the water,
hands clasped around the lingering warmth
of your vending machine Royal Milk Tea.
I lay down the tiles for “SPARKLE.” Seven letters.
“Impressive,” you mutter, and grinning
I wrestle new letters from the bag.
Our hands pass more rapidly
over the board. You set M beside E.
and I put U beside versatile S
until there are no words left
and the afternoon has faded into night.
It is the first time I beat you.
Later, we search for fireflies in the darkness
and find them, like shooting stars.
We tread off the lit paths and cast
our bodies into one another – in a gazebo,
against the cold painted steel of a playground slide,
tangled in a tire swing dangling from an old pine.
I think you love me then.
Aiko Harman
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
These Foolish Things
There are three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. The professional, a staple of Shakespeare's plays, is, in reality, nobody's fool.
Aristotle is sometimes called the Master of Those Who Know, which may explain why most people find him easier to admire than to like. By contrast, his own teacher's famous teacher might be dubbed the Master of Those Who Haven't a Clue. Informed by an oracle that he was the wisest of men, Socrates immediately recognized that this must be some kind of Delphic joke. Wise, pshaw! At best he was just a lover of wisdom etymologically a philo-sopher rather than a possessor of it. Really, Glaucus he might have said if I am so smart, why do I have to go around asking all these questions?
Still, Socrates does at least look the part of antiquity's Yoda. Everyone knows that to be wise means to be old, with lots of wrinkles around kindly eyes that have seen much and forgiven much and are full of pity for the fools that mortals be. But that, in short, is the trouble with wisdom. It implies a superiority to or withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life. While most of us are surrendering to what Joseph Conrad called the destructive element, and probably drowning in it, the wise guy is there on the shore warm and dry in his old flannel dressing gown and his new fluffy bunny slippers, and he's probably murmuring something like, Grasshopper, only a fool would go into the water on a day like this. Shaking his head, he will soon pad on back to his snug little burrow and a nice cup of chamomile tea.
This is living? Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that Wise men say, Only fools rush in. But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? The heart has reasons that the reason doesn't know. No proverb says that love should be the end product of careful calculation, that it's the smart move. This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet. Besides, who would trust his emotional life to a program written by some Caltech brainiac who's spent his entire geeky existence playing Halo and Warcraft? To quote Mr. T, I pity the fool.
As every truly wise man or woman knows, love is just one of those crazy things, and there's no logic to what attracts us to one person and not another. You can tot up the pluses and minuses of a relationship all you want, meditate on the possible outcomes of commitment, consult past experience, but you'd do just as well, or better, to listen to a lot of country and western music. You want an explanation for falling in love? Maybe it was Memphis. Montaigne, whose Socratic motto was What do I know? accounted for his love for his friend Etienne de la Boetie perfectly: Because he was he and I was I.
In other words, when it comes to falling in love, who can explain it? Who can tell me why? Well, the goddess Folly can. In Erasmus's The Praise of Folly she proclaims that she oversees love, that folly embodies the intuitive and passionate side of life and is far more fundamental to our human well-being than propriety or reason.
And that's just for starters. Folly points out that Christ endured the folly of the cross and reminded His followers to imitate children, lilies, mustard-seed, and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live their lives by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose. Folly represents the natural in all its senses, standing in opposition to the mind-forged manacles of societal norms and expectations. Eventually, notes Erasmus, this sort of folly can even modulate into mystical distraction and ecstasy. Plato asserted that the madness of physical love, during which we forget all about thinking and our spirit seems to leave the body, is the highest form of ordinary happiness, while Christianity offers a similar joyful and irrational dream state when the soul temporarily unites itself with God.
Humanity, that dialectical animal, likes to look at things as binary opposites: raw and cooked, gay and straight, Laurel and Hardy. Just so, foolishness is the usual antithesis of wisdom. But foolishness, as Erasmus reminds us, is one of those qualities with a bit of range to it, so that another possible opposite is prudence. In fact, prudence and wisdom are practically roommates, and while sometimes being wise can look attractive Gandalf, anyone? almost nobody, except perhaps investment counselors, really wants to be thought of as prudent. Might just as well be an old maid in sensible black shoes or a Mr. Peepers with a coin purse. No, no, no; give me stiletto heels or give me death! If you can't say keep the change, why bother to go to the bar?
In truth, there are essentially three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. Real Fools are the innocents, the simpletons, the idiot savants and naturals who react to situations and people with an Aspergian lack of restraint or decorum. They speak their unmediated minds, and great truths sometimes emerge, as out of the mouths of babes. Any of them might have blurted, The emperor has no clothes. Forrest Gump is our great modern examplar of this kind of fool. Heaven looks out for such as these.
Professional Fools include court jesters, clowns, toadies, con artists, and a whole range of yes-men. By pretending to be stupid or servile, the Professional Fool coolly aims to reinforce his client's conviction of his own obvious superiority. In fact, these performance artistes always quip and caper with a purpose: a salary, behind-the-throne power, a scam. In literature one of the most memorable of these professional fools is Rameaus Nephew, who in Diderots famous dialogue of that name toadies to the rich and powerful in return for a snug berth and regular meals. In the film The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey is a more complex example: Hunched and crippled (as were many professional court jesters), he's slightly pitied by the tough and obviously much smarter people all around him. But Verbal Kint is far more than the talkative child that his name suggests.
As for Unsuspecting Fools, they are essentially everyone else in the world, starting with you and me. Everybody plays the fool sometimes; there's no exception to the rule. More particularly, the Unsuspecting Fool is the supposedly wise figure a sovereign, a pedantic scholar, a pillar of the establishment who is blind to his own vanity and self-importance, ignorant of what's really going on, puffed up with hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. In tragic vein, Oedipus and Lear are Unsuspecting Fools.
If you want to understand the power of Real Foolishness, read fairy tales. If theres one thing that such stories teach us, it's to trust animals. The simpleton who befriends the local forest creatures will find the treasure and win the princess. Every time. Not the clever older brothers with some Mission: Impossible plan. The guy who takes the thorn out of the lion's paw, who doesn't trample on the ants, who is careful not to crush the wildflowers will be rewarded.
Why is this? Because such saintly or holy fools possess a primitive, almost prelapsarian goodness. They are close to Nature, and they are empathetic and kind and humble and unsure of themselves and maybe not very good-looking either. They're picked on by society and were probably in the lowest reading group, and their good souls shine forth like shook foil. Think Shrek. It's no accident that the Feast of the Holy Innocents is also the date for the Feast of Fools. Over and over again, the Bible reminds us that the humble will be exalted.
In Shakespearean comedies (and tragedies) you're certainly smart to play the Professional Fool or clown. When Bottom the Weaver is translated into an ass, the very symbol of the fool, what happens? The gorgeous Titania leads him away for some quality time in her bower. Hamlet knows that with his antic disposition on, he can do or say whatever he'd like. There's no need to act the conventional young intellectual like his earnest schoolmate Horatio, who probably wears a bow tie and always makes the dean's list at Wittenberg. As for the late Yorick, that fellow of infinite jest was obviously the only person at the gloomy court of Denmark who ever brought a spark of joy into the life of the melancholy Dane: He hath borne me on his back a thousand times! Even the greatest of all Shakespearean characters, Falstaff, is essentially a fool writ very, very large. Wherever Sir John goes, it's party time, Carnival, and he is the Lord of Misrule. Certainly this jolly fat man is a lot better company than, say, the rather cold-hearted and manipulative Prospero. But even that magician finally decides to drown his book and give up his power. Being superhuman isn't half as much fun as being human.
As for those Unsuspecting Fools, take a look at King Lear. Here the best and the brightest the king himself; the clever, upwardly mobile Regan and Goneril; that shrewd bastard Edmund wreak nothing but havoc and sorrow. Everything goes wrong. But why, how, could this happen to them? They took every precaution, they carefully plotted and schemed, they made Venn diagrams and flow charts, and they were careful not to let people or human feelings interfere with their big plans. By contrast, the most admirable characters in the play are terribly naοve (Cordelia), insane (Edgar as Tom O'Bedlam), or simpleminded (the Fool).
One might argue that Shakespeare's wicked characters aren't wise but merely worldly wise and usually too smart for their own good. They re the sort of people to whom Paul offers his famous advice in his first letter to the Corinthians: If any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. They are, in fact, self-centered egotists who have suppressed the springs of natural affection. In this respect, if not in any other, they aren't really so different from the great sages and Buddhas, who remove themselves from this world, who keep a safe distance from the bonfires of desire. The austerity of spiritual life, the quest for perfect understanding or oneness or transcendence, asks that we give up being human. Is any abstraction really worth so much?
The English author Walter Pater suggested that we should seek experience itself, rather than the fruit of experience, i.e., wisdom. Of course, he was an aesthete with an ornate style, so it's easy to dismiss what he said. It's important for human beings to make mistakes, to do stupid things, to go overboard, to be foolish even if it's painful and not to judge themselves too harshly when they've been burnt. As Zorba the Greek used to proclaim, Life is trouble!
Let me bring this foolishness to an end by repeating the advice from the closing lines of The Praise of Folly: Clap your hands, live well, and drink! In other words, meine Damen und Herren, life is a cabaret. What is the use of sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play! And, then, if you're really wise or do I mean foolish? you might as well dance.
Text by Michael Dirda
fall 09
Source:www.incharacter.org
Aristotle is sometimes called the Master of Those Who Know, which may explain why most people find him easier to admire than to like. By contrast, his own teacher's famous teacher might be dubbed the Master of Those Who Haven't a Clue. Informed by an oracle that he was the wisest of men, Socrates immediately recognized that this must be some kind of Delphic joke. Wise, pshaw! At best he was just a lover of wisdom etymologically a philo-sopher rather than a possessor of it. Really, Glaucus he might have said if I am so smart, why do I have to go around asking all these questions?
Still, Socrates does at least look the part of antiquity's Yoda. Everyone knows that to be wise means to be old, with lots of wrinkles around kindly eyes that have seen much and forgiven much and are full of pity for the fools that mortals be. But that, in short, is the trouble with wisdom. It implies a superiority to or withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life. While most of us are surrendering to what Joseph Conrad called the destructive element, and probably drowning in it, the wise guy is there on the shore warm and dry in his old flannel dressing gown and his new fluffy bunny slippers, and he's probably murmuring something like, Grasshopper, only a fool would go into the water on a day like this. Shaking his head, he will soon pad on back to his snug little burrow and a nice cup of chamomile tea.
This is living? Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that Wise men say, Only fools rush in. But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? The heart has reasons that the reason doesn't know. No proverb says that love should be the end product of careful calculation, that it's the smart move. This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet. Besides, who would trust his emotional life to a program written by some Caltech brainiac who's spent his entire geeky existence playing Halo and Warcraft? To quote Mr. T, I pity the fool.
As every truly wise man or woman knows, love is just one of those crazy things, and there's no logic to what attracts us to one person and not another. You can tot up the pluses and minuses of a relationship all you want, meditate on the possible outcomes of commitment, consult past experience, but you'd do just as well, or better, to listen to a lot of country and western music. You want an explanation for falling in love? Maybe it was Memphis. Montaigne, whose Socratic motto was What do I know? accounted for his love for his friend Etienne de la Boetie perfectly: Because he was he and I was I.
In other words, when it comes to falling in love, who can explain it? Who can tell me why? Well, the goddess Folly can. In Erasmus's The Praise of Folly she proclaims that she oversees love, that folly embodies the intuitive and passionate side of life and is far more fundamental to our human well-being than propriety or reason.
And that's just for starters. Folly points out that Christ endured the folly of the cross and reminded His followers to imitate children, lilies, mustard-seed, and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live their lives by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose. Folly represents the natural in all its senses, standing in opposition to the mind-forged manacles of societal norms and expectations. Eventually, notes Erasmus, this sort of folly can even modulate into mystical distraction and ecstasy. Plato asserted that the madness of physical love, during which we forget all about thinking and our spirit seems to leave the body, is the highest form of ordinary happiness, while Christianity offers a similar joyful and irrational dream state when the soul temporarily unites itself with God.
Humanity, that dialectical animal, likes to look at things as binary opposites: raw and cooked, gay and straight, Laurel and Hardy. Just so, foolishness is the usual antithesis of wisdom. But foolishness, as Erasmus reminds us, is one of those qualities with a bit of range to it, so that another possible opposite is prudence. In fact, prudence and wisdom are practically roommates, and while sometimes being wise can look attractive Gandalf, anyone? almost nobody, except perhaps investment counselors, really wants to be thought of as prudent. Might just as well be an old maid in sensible black shoes or a Mr. Peepers with a coin purse. No, no, no; give me stiletto heels or give me death! If you can't say keep the change, why bother to go to the bar?
In truth, there are essentially three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. Real Fools are the innocents, the simpletons, the idiot savants and naturals who react to situations and people with an Aspergian lack of restraint or decorum. They speak their unmediated minds, and great truths sometimes emerge, as out of the mouths of babes. Any of them might have blurted, The emperor has no clothes. Forrest Gump is our great modern examplar of this kind of fool. Heaven looks out for such as these.
Professional Fools include court jesters, clowns, toadies, con artists, and a whole range of yes-men. By pretending to be stupid or servile, the Professional Fool coolly aims to reinforce his client's conviction of his own obvious superiority. In fact, these performance artistes always quip and caper with a purpose: a salary, behind-the-throne power, a scam. In literature one of the most memorable of these professional fools is Rameaus Nephew, who in Diderots famous dialogue of that name toadies to the rich and powerful in return for a snug berth and regular meals. In the film The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey is a more complex example: Hunched and crippled (as were many professional court jesters), he's slightly pitied by the tough and obviously much smarter people all around him. But Verbal Kint is far more than the talkative child that his name suggests.
As for Unsuspecting Fools, they are essentially everyone else in the world, starting with you and me. Everybody plays the fool sometimes; there's no exception to the rule. More particularly, the Unsuspecting Fool is the supposedly wise figure a sovereign, a pedantic scholar, a pillar of the establishment who is blind to his own vanity and self-importance, ignorant of what's really going on, puffed up with hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. In tragic vein, Oedipus and Lear are Unsuspecting Fools.
If you want to understand the power of Real Foolishness, read fairy tales. If theres one thing that such stories teach us, it's to trust animals. The simpleton who befriends the local forest creatures will find the treasure and win the princess. Every time. Not the clever older brothers with some Mission: Impossible plan. The guy who takes the thorn out of the lion's paw, who doesn't trample on the ants, who is careful not to crush the wildflowers will be rewarded.
Why is this? Because such saintly or holy fools possess a primitive, almost prelapsarian goodness. They are close to Nature, and they are empathetic and kind and humble and unsure of themselves and maybe not very good-looking either. They're picked on by society and were probably in the lowest reading group, and their good souls shine forth like shook foil. Think Shrek. It's no accident that the Feast of the Holy Innocents is also the date for the Feast of Fools. Over and over again, the Bible reminds us that the humble will be exalted.
In Shakespearean comedies (and tragedies) you're certainly smart to play the Professional Fool or clown. When Bottom the Weaver is translated into an ass, the very symbol of the fool, what happens? The gorgeous Titania leads him away for some quality time in her bower. Hamlet knows that with his antic disposition on, he can do or say whatever he'd like. There's no need to act the conventional young intellectual like his earnest schoolmate Horatio, who probably wears a bow tie and always makes the dean's list at Wittenberg. As for the late Yorick, that fellow of infinite jest was obviously the only person at the gloomy court of Denmark who ever brought a spark of joy into the life of the melancholy Dane: He hath borne me on his back a thousand times! Even the greatest of all Shakespearean characters, Falstaff, is essentially a fool writ very, very large. Wherever Sir John goes, it's party time, Carnival, and he is the Lord of Misrule. Certainly this jolly fat man is a lot better company than, say, the rather cold-hearted and manipulative Prospero. But even that magician finally decides to drown his book and give up his power. Being superhuman isn't half as much fun as being human.
As for those Unsuspecting Fools, take a look at King Lear. Here the best and the brightest the king himself; the clever, upwardly mobile Regan and Goneril; that shrewd bastard Edmund wreak nothing but havoc and sorrow. Everything goes wrong. But why, how, could this happen to them? They took every precaution, they carefully plotted and schemed, they made Venn diagrams and flow charts, and they were careful not to let people or human feelings interfere with their big plans. By contrast, the most admirable characters in the play are terribly naοve (Cordelia), insane (Edgar as Tom O'Bedlam), or simpleminded (the Fool).
One might argue that Shakespeare's wicked characters aren't wise but merely worldly wise and usually too smart for their own good. They re the sort of people to whom Paul offers his famous advice in his first letter to the Corinthians: If any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. They are, in fact, self-centered egotists who have suppressed the springs of natural affection. In this respect, if not in any other, they aren't really so different from the great sages and Buddhas, who remove themselves from this world, who keep a safe distance from the bonfires of desire. The austerity of spiritual life, the quest for perfect understanding or oneness or transcendence, asks that we give up being human. Is any abstraction really worth so much?
The English author Walter Pater suggested that we should seek experience itself, rather than the fruit of experience, i.e., wisdom. Of course, he was an aesthete with an ornate style, so it's easy to dismiss what he said. It's important for human beings to make mistakes, to do stupid things, to go overboard, to be foolish even if it's painful and not to judge themselves too harshly when they've been burnt. As Zorba the Greek used to proclaim, Life is trouble!
Let me bring this foolishness to an end by repeating the advice from the closing lines of The Praise of Folly: Clap your hands, live well, and drink! In other words, meine Damen und Herren, life is a cabaret. What is the use of sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play! And, then, if you're really wise or do I mean foolish? you might as well dance.
Text by Michael Dirda
fall 09
Source:www.incharacter.org
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Signs outside the Louisiana home of Royal Robertson
Signs outside the Louisiana home of Royal Robertson
Photo by John Drury, 1991
Αφηγήσεις της κατοικίας στη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη
ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΙΑΣ ΤΜΗΜΑ ΑΡΧΙΤΕΚΤΟΝΩΝ ΜΗΧΑΝΙΚΩΝ ΧΕΙΜΕΡΙΝΟ ΕΞΑΜΗΝΟ 2009-2010
«Αφηγήσεις της κατοικίας στη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη»
Μάθημα: Κωστής Βελώνης
Περιγραφή του μαθήματος
Το μάθημα επιδιώκει να φανερωθούν οι τρόποι ώστε να συλλογιστεί κανείς την «οικιακότητα», τον ιδιωτικό και οικογενειακό βίο όπως τον αντιλήφθηκαν οι καλλιτεχνικές πρωτοπορίες από τα τέλη του 19 αιώνα καθώς και σ’ολη την ιστορική εξέλιξη της νεωτερικότητας. Εστιάζοντας τόσο στις γενικές αρχές των εικαστικών κινημάτων όσο και σε μεμονωμένες περιπτώσεις καλλιτεχνών κατανοούμε τους λόγους για τους οποίους άλλες φορές ενθαρρύνεται, αμφισβητείται ή και περιφρονείται η κουλτούρα γύρω από την κατοικία. Μέσα από την ιστορία της τέχνης και των εφαρμογών της στο σχεδιασμό, στις εικονογραφήσεις, το κινηματογράφο και γενικότερα στη μαζική παράγωγη του υλικού πολιτισμού δίνω έμφαση στους ρόλους των φύλων μέσα στη κατοικία, στις ιδεολογικές θέσεις πάνω στον καθημερινό βίο του νοικοκυριού, στις ταξικές και κοινωνικές συγκρούσεις της πρωτοπορίας με τις αρχιτεκτονικές νόρμες των κατοικιών του 20 αιώνα. Πως τελικά ο σύζυγος ως «μαχητής» του δημόσιου βίου ορίζει την παραμονή του μέσα στον οίκο και πότε την ακυρώνει;
Άραγε μήπως η ιδέα της «πρωτοπορίας» διαμόρφωσε τα χαρακτηριστικά της βασιζόμενη στην απόρριψη του οικείου, του γνώριμου αλλά και του οικιακού, του χώρου δηλαδή που κάποιος μόνιμα η πρόσκαιρα κατοικεί?
Μια επανεγγραφή της ιστορίας με άξονα την «οικιακότητα» σε ποιους καλλιτέχνες θα αναγνώριζε τη δυνατότητα μιας προφητικής και επίκαιρης κριτικής ισότιμης με την ποικίλη και πιο σύνθετη «δημοκρατικότητα» του τέλους του μοντερνισμού ;
Αυτό που εξετάζω παράλληλα με την «επίσημη» avant garde είναι και μια «προαστιακή θηλυκή νεωτερικότητα» που δίνει έμφαση στις «αξιες» ή στις πολυπλοκότητες της κατοίκησης και της οποίας τα ιχνη μπορουν να βρεθούν ακόμα και πριν την δεκαετία του 70. Αυτές οι σιωπηλές για την αναγνωρισμένη καταγραφή της ιστορίας της τέχνης πολιτισμικές ετερότητες ορίζουν ένα πρόσφατο σχετικά πεδίο έρευνας που μπορεί να ανακατασκευάσει τις γνωστές διαδρομές της μοντέρνας τέχνης και να ενδυναμώσει τις πιο πρόσφατες κατευθύνσεις.
Στη συνέχεια ακολουθεί μια σύντομη παρουσίαση κάθε ενότητας. Στις περισσότερες περιπτώσεις, στην διάρκεια της διάλεξης περιλαμβάνονται περισσότερες ενότητες. Επίσης δεν έχουν απόλυτα χρονολογικό χαρακτήρα, και κάθε φορά αλλάζουν ανάλογα με τις ανάγκες του μαθήματος.
Η διεκδίκηση της μοντέρνας ταυτότητας της νοικοκυράς
Σε αυτή την ενότητα εστιάζουμε στα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα και τις αρχές του 20ου εξετάζοντας τα χαρακτηριστικά της «γυναικείας δημιουργικότητας» μέσα από την διακόσμηση της οικίας. Στόχος είναι να έχουμε μια ξεκάθαρη εικόνα για το πώς εισάγεται το νεωτερικό στοιχείο στις διακοσμητικές τέχνες πριν την ιστορική επισημοποίηση της "μοντέρνας τέχνης». Οι «στρατηγικές» της συζύγου μέσα στον οίκο μας βοηθούν να υποστηρίξουμε την γένεση μιας παράλληλης προς την «επίσημη» avant-garde «προαστιακής νεωτερικότητας» αποκλειστικά γυναικείας, η οποία στηρίζει την σχέση του ιδιώτη με την οικία αντί να την αποδυναμώνει και να εναντιώνεται προς το διακοσμητικό, εμμένοντας σ’ ένα είδος «οικιακής εγκατάστασης».
Ενδεικτικά έργα :Διαφημίσεις πολυκαταστημάτων (Παρίσι, 19ος αιώνας)/ Vuillard, «Οι κίτρινες κουρτίνες», 1893/ M.Cottin, «Les Petits riens», 1896/ Bonnard, “Όρθιο γυμνό» 1919/ Εικονογραφήσεις περιοδικών για τη διακόσμηση(19ος αιωνας)
Αξίες της αστικής οικογένειας στο γαλλικό και αμερικανικό ιμπρεσιονισμό
Αναφερόμαστε στις οικιακές αναπαραστάσεις του καλλιτεχνικού εργαστηρίου μέσα από το έργο των ιμπρεσιονιστών όπου τα όρια ανάμεσα στο χώρο δουλειάς και κατοικίας είναι ασαφή. Εξετάζουμε τις ομοιότητες και τις διάφορες στο γυναίκειο γαλλικό και τον αμερικανικο αντρικό ιμπρεσιονισμό. Eμφαση δίνεται στο έργο του Manet σε σχέση με τους ρόλους των μοντέλων του και τις επιρροές των μεταγενέστερων
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Εικονογραφήσεις για το «Σαλόνι» του Παρισιού/ William Merritt Chase “The hall at Shinnecock”, 1892/ Edmund C.Tarbell, «Girls Reading», 1907/ Mary Cassat, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” 1878/ Berthe Morisot, “Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wigh”, 1875 / Manet, “Olympia”, 1863/ “Portrait d’Emile Zola”, 1868.
Σκανδιναβικές μόδες του κατοικείν : Από τον Carl Larsson στο ΙΚΕΑ
Αναφέρομαι στις πρώτες δημοσιεύσεις του Carl Larsson το 1895 οι οποίες εικονογραφούν την κατοικία της οικογένειας του στην περιοχή Lilla Hyttnas της Σουηδίας. Ο σχεδιασμός εσωτερικών χώρων του Larsson που εκφράζει την ανάγκη για ένα ιδανικό προβιομηχανικό παρελθόν του οποίου η φιλοσοφία εκφράζεται εν μέρει και στην «γραμμή» της ΙΚΕΑ έρχεται να υπογραμμίσει μια κρίση και μια αναβάθμιση απέναντι στον μοντέρνο σχεδιασμό. Συγκρίνουμε το προγενέστερο υλικό με τα εξπρεσιονιστικά και υπαρξιακά δωμάτια του Edward Munch και Vilhelm Hammershoi αντίστοιχα.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Carl Larsson, “Ett hem” 1899/ Edvard Munch, «Το φιλί», 1892/ Vilhelm Hammershοi, «Dust Motes Dancing in Sunlight», 1900/ Σύγχρονες εικαστικές εγκαταστάσεις
«Η χαρά της ζωής» του Μatisse και η τέχνη του κουρασμένου Businessman
Η ζωγραφική του Matisse ανεξάρτητα από τον ριζοσπαστικό χαρακτήρα της τις μέρες του «φοβισμού», συμμετείχε συνειδητά στην επιδιωκόμενη γαλήνια ατμόσφαιρα του οικογενειακού περιβάλλοντος. Ανιχνεύουμε τους κοινούς συνδέσμους ανάμεσα στις ασθένειες της πόλης (νευρασθένεια) και τις διακοσμητικές επιρροές του Μatisse που επιδιώκουν την «ευτυχία» μέσα στο κατοικείν.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Matisse “Στοχασμός (μετά το μπάνιο) 1920-21, “το ροζ atelier” 1911 , «η οικογένεια του ζωγράφου», 1911 / Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, «Το τραγούδι των Βοσκών», 1890.
Προσπερνώντας την οικία στη μοντέρνα γλυπτική: Τακτικές του “ανοίγματος” της κλειστής φόρμας
Σημείο εκκίνησης της ενότητας είναι η εξιστόρηση της σταδιακής κατάργησης του περίκλειστου γλυπτικού όγκου στην μοντέρνα πλαστική έκφραση. Παρουσιάζω συμπτώματα αυτής της διάνοιξης καταδεικνύοντας τις συγγένειες προς μια αρχιτεκτονική σύλληψη της γλυπτικής μέσα από το έργο του Boccioni, του Gabo, του Picasso, του Gonzalez κ.α.
Θα συζητήσουμε τις συνέπειες του ανοίγματος του γλυπτού το οποίο θα επιτρέψει την ανάπτυξη ενός ζωτικού κυριολεκτικού χώρου. Είναι όμως εξίσου σημαντικό να διευκρινίσουμε ποιές είναι οι θεματικές διαδρομές της «μεταφορικής» κατοίκησης μέσα στο εικαστικό έργο.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Umberto Boccioni, “Sviluppo di bottiglia nello spazio”, 1912 / “Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio”, 1913/ ‘ Τραπέζι+ Μπουκάλι + Σπίτια’, 1912/ " La strada entra nella casa", 1911/ “Dinamismo di un cavallo in corsa + case”, 1914–15/ Picasso " Κιθάρα" , 1912 / "Ποτήρι, μαχαίρι και σάντουιτς σ’ ένα τραπέζι ", 1914/ A.G.Bragaglia, «Φιγούρα κατεβαίνοντας τις σκάλες- αυτοπορτραίτο», 1911 /Σπουδή για μια νέα φωτογραφική εικόνα», 1911/ Gabo, “Ογκομετρικός και Στερεομετρικός κύβος”, 1937/ «Δομημένο κεφάλι μίας γυναίκας», 1917/ «Κεφάλι» , 1916.
Οίκος και ταξική συνείδηση στην πικτοριαλιστική και ρεαλιστική φωτογραφία
Μέσα από φωτογραφικό υλικό των τελών του 19ου αιώνα παρέχουμε πληροφορίες για τις ιδεολογικές και αισθητικές προθέσεις στην καταγραφή εσωτερικών χώρων στην εργατική και αστική τάξη. θα τεθούν ζητήματα που αφορούν στο βικτωριανό πρότυπο του κατοικείν όπως και της ρεαλιστικής παράδοσης τη φωτογραφίας στην προσπάθεια της να συγκινήσει την αστική τάξη.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Riis, ”How the other half lives”, 1888/ Lewis Hine, “Tenement, Jewish family”, 1912/ Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Return after Three Days", 1865 / Clarence H. White, “Ring Toss”, 1899
Μια κατοικία για του εκλεκτούς: Τακτικές του αποκλεισμού και κοσμοπολίτικες φιέστες
Εστιάζω στην αμφίσημη σχέση κυβισμού με την διακόσμηση μέσα από μανιφέστα και τις εκθεσιακές επιλογές του κινήματος. Αναφέρομαι διεξοδικά σε τρεις διαφορετικές στρατηγικές του εκθέτειν με το «Maison Cubiste”, τις δραστηριότητες του dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler και τoυ σχεδιαστή μόδας Paul Poiret.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: George Lepape, «Les choses de Paul Poiret vues par George Lepape», 1911/ Φωτογραφικό υλικό από τη γιορτή του Paul Poiret, La mille et deuxieume nuit, 1911/ Raul Dufy, «La Perse», 1911/ Marie Laurencin, «Les gloves», 1937 /Picasso, «Cubiste portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler”,1910/ Braque, “sculpture unique” 1914/ Marevna, «Κυβιστικά ηλιοτρόπια» 1914
Φουτουρισμός και η ηρωική έξοδος από το σπίτι
Εστιάζουμε στην στρατιωτική ορολογία της πρωτοπορίας για να προσδιορίσω τα αίτια της απαξίωσης του οικιακού περιβάλλοντος. Διαφορετικές ερμηνείες της “εμπροσθοφυλακής» από την ιακωβίνικη και τη σοσιαλιστική πρωτοπορία μέχρι την φασιστική πρωτοπορία των φουτουριστών. Αναλύουμε την αναπαράσταση της μαχητικής avant garde στην φουτουριστική τέχνη καθώς τη σχέση των φουτουριστών με τις γυναίκες.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Balla, “Street Light”, 1911/ Severini, « Armored Train in Action » 1915/ Severini “Maternity” 1916/ Felix Valloton, “L’attaque” 1894/ Wassili Kandinsky, Ο Αποχαιρετισμός, 1903.
Το «σοσιαλιστικό αντικείμενο» στους κοινόχρηστους χώρους των μπολσεβίκων
Eξετάζουμε τους τρόπους με τους οποίους αμφισβητήθηκε η ατομική κατοικία την περίοδο της οκτωβριανής επανάστασης. Παρουσιάζω παραλλαγές του οράματος για το συλλογικό κοινωνικό χώρο στην κομουνιστική ουτοπία μέσα από το έργο των ρώσων κονστρουκτιβιστών, σουπρεματιστών και προντουκτιβιστών. Παρατηρούμε τις συνέπειες της εφαρμογής της κοινοκτημοσύνης την σταλινική περίοδο και την επανεξέταση της παρέμβασης της σοβιετικής ιδεολογίας στο ιδιωτικό χώρο μέσα στη σύγχρονη ρώσικη τέχνη. Ειδική αναφορά στο θεωρητικό έργο του Τρότσκι και του Αrvatov για την κατοικία και το αντικείμενο.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Σοβιετικές Αφίσες για την κατοικία/ Gustav Klutsis «Μακέτα κατασκευής», άγνωστη ημερομηνία/ El Lissitzky, “Wolkenbügel”, photomontage (πλατεία Nikitskii στη Μόσχα), 1925/ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy “Light-Space Modulator“, 1922-30/ Aleksandr Rodchenko «Μη-αντικειμενικό γλυπτό αρ.6», 1918/ Vladimir Stenberg «κατασκευή στο χώρο KPS 42 IV»,1919-21/ Vladimir Tatlin “Corner Relief“, 1915/ Ilya Kabakov «The Man Who Flew Into Space From his Apartment», 1968-1996/ “C’est ici que nous vivons”, 1995
Ο σουρεαλισμός και το “κάστρο” : το ασυνείδητο της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής
Σε αυτήν την ενότητα ανατρέχω στην αντιπάθεια των σουρεαλιστών για τη μοντέρνα αρχιτεκτονική. Ξεκινώ από το μανιφέστο του Breton και την προτίμηση του για την τυπολογία του κάστρου ως ένα απελευθερωμένο κοινωνικό χώρο και συνεχίζω με τα παιδικά δωμάτια των τελών του 19 αιώνα που αποτέλεσαν τόπους ανάπτυξης της φαντασίας.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Max Ernst, Une semaine de Bonte /Man Ray, Le chateau de des, 1929/ Jean Cocteau, La belle et la Bête, 1946 /Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 1936/ Dali, Dream of Venus, 1939
Σχεδιασμός εσωτερικών χώρων και η πρακτική της «ενδομήτριας» αρχιτεκτονικής
Διαβάζουμε αποσπάσματα κείμενων που αποδεικνύουν τον ενθουσιασμό του Dali με την art Nouveau και περιγράφουμε τους εσωτερικούς χώρους του Monkton House του Edward James με τον οποίο συνεργάζεται ο Dali. Τα επιχειρήματα του Τζαρά για την «ενδομήτρια αρχιτεκτονική” συνεισφέρουν σε μια συνολική θεώρηση της σουρεαλιστικής αρχιτεκτονικής. Στην συνέχεια ο βιομορφισμός του Roberto Matta παραλληλίζεται με το αρχιτεκτονικό όραμα του Frederick Κiesler για τα οργανικά κτίρια. Το μάθημα συμπληρώνεται με την σύντομη προβολή φιλμικού υλικού που ανιχνεύει την σουρεαλιστική αντίληψη για τους εσωτερικούς χώρους.
Ενδεικτικά έργα και κατοικίες : Edward James, Monkton House, Sussex/ Las Pozas, Xilitla, 50’s/ Giacometti, The palace at 4.a.m, 1932-33/ Frederick Kiesler, Endless House,1926/ Roberto Μatta, mathematique sensible–architecture du temps, 1938/Joseph Cornell, Setting for a Fairy Tale, 1942.
Ιδιωτικότητα και φετιχισμός: αναπαραστάσεις του γυναικείου σώματος στη σουρεαλιστική και ντανταιστική παράδοση
Η αφορμή για το μάθημα είναι οι έκθέσεις «Exposition surealiste des objets» στη Γκαλερί Charles Ratton και η «Exposition Ιnternational du Surrealisme», στη Γκαλερί Beaux Arts, τα 1936 και το 1938 αντίστοιχα. Εμβαθύνουμε στην κάθε συμμετοχή ξεχωριστά, όπως στην Claude Cahun, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp κ.α Στο ίδιο πλαίσιο συσχέτισης με την ιδιωτικότητα αναφερόμαστε στο έργο του Molinier, Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Balthus, στην χορογράφο Maya Deren και στην Βαρόνη Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Claude Cahun, «αυτοπορτραίτo» 1932/ Balthus “Nu avec le chat” 1948/ Dorothea Tanning “Τragic Τable” 1973/ Meret Oppenheim, “Ma gouvernante”,1936/ Marcel Duchamp, “1200 Coal Sacs,1938
Κουκλόσπιτα ενάντια σε μακέτες και η κρυφή κατοικία του Duchamp
Εξετάζω τις σχέσεις ανάμεσα στο “Βoite en valise” του Marcel Duchamp και στο οικογενειακό κουκλόσπιτο της διακοσμήτριας Carrie Stettheimer. Αφηγούμαστε πώς ο ίδιος ο καλλιτέχνης αξιοποίησε την ιδέα της μινιατούρας στα ύστερα έργα του. Στην συνέχεια, αντιπαραθέτω τον κόσμο του γυναικείου κουκλόσπιτου μ’ εκείνο της αρχιτεκτονικής μακέτας, γεφυρώνοντας τις προπολεμικές γυναικείες διακοσμητικές πρακτικές με την όψιμη μοντέρνα φεμινιστική τέχνη.
Έχοντας εξαντλήσει το διάλογο με τα «γούστα» της πνευματικής ελίτ των «μοντέρνων καιρών», καλούμαστε να αναζητήσουμε το μη ορατό αλλά υπαρκτό των «ανεπιθύμητων» εμπειριών κοιτώντας την ιστορία ξανά μέσα από την «κρυμμένη κατοικία», εκείνης της Stettheimer που ο Duchamp της είχε δωρίσει μια μινιατούρα του «γυμνού που κατεβαίνει γυμνό τις σκάλες».
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Marcel Duchamp , "Nu descendant un escalier αρ.2” , 1912”, / “Boite –en- valise”, 1941/ “Fresh Widow”, 1920/ Carrie Stettheimer “dollshouse”, 1916-35 / Florine Stettheimer “Portrait of my sister Carrie with Dollhouse”, 1923 /Womanhouse project, 1972/ Miriam Shapiro και Sherry Brody “Dollshouse”, 1972.
Το σώμα ως κατοικία στη μεταπολεμική τέχνη : ανάμεσα στην προστασία και την απειλή
Σε αυτή την ενότητα στοχεύω να αναδείξω την συγγένεια μεταξύ οικίας και εγκατάστασης. Εστιάζω στην μεταπολεμική γλυπτική όπου το ανθρώπινο σώμα μετα τον δεύτερο παγκόσμιο πόλεμο αντιμετωπίζεται ως αρχιτεκτονικός χώρος, κέλυφος, οίκος που προσδίδει μια συνθήκη αυτοαναφορικότητας και εκφέρει στοιχεία περισυλλογής και απομόνωσης. Με αντικείμενο τις πρακτικές της πρωτοπορίας στο θέμα της ιδιωτικής κατοικίας, θίγω το ζήτημα της οριοθέτησης της αρχιτεκτονικής μορφής μέσα από το εγγενές οικείο κέλυφος του ανθρώπινου σώματος.
Ενδεικτικά έργα :Joseph Beuys, “Plight”, 1964-72 / Dubuffet, “Closerie Falbala” , 1971-1976/ Per Inge Bjorlo, “Indre romV”, 1991 / Mario Merz, “Igloo di Giap”, 1968.
Μέσα στην οικία : Ο θρίαμβος της τηλεόρασης και η υπεροχή της «αμερικάνικης» κουζίνας στη μεταπολεμική γλυπτική
Σε αυτό το μάθημα προσπαθώ να αποδείξω με ποιους τρόπους το μοντέρνοo ύφος του εσωτερικού χώρου της οικίας λειτούργησε καταλυτικά για την εθνική ταυτότητα της αμερικάνικης κοινωνίας, και συγκεκριμένα πώς η αναβάθμιση της μεταπολεμικής κουζίνας χρησίμευε για τις ιδεολογικές διαφωνίες καπιταλισμού –κομμουνισμού.
Με ευκολία συμπεραίνουμε ότι η έννοια της κατοικίας μεταπολεμικά προχωρά σε μια αναθεώρηση της απομονωμένης της ταυτότητας και εμπλέκεται σε ιδέες που στοχεύουν στη μεταμόρφωση της από χώρο διαβίωσης σε τόπο αναψυχής και διασκέδασης.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Εdwardo Paolozzi “It’s a psychological Fact Pleasure Helps Your Disposition”, 1948/“Aμερικάνικος τρόπος ζωής», Πάρκο Sokolniki, Μόσχα, 1959/ Richard Hamilton «Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”, 1956/ Gerhard Richter, Konrand Lueng “Leben mit pop-eine demonstration fur den kapitalistischen realismus”, 1963/ Vostell «TV-Décoll/age αρ. 1», 1958-1961/ «Concrete TV Paris» (1974-81,/ Andy Warhol, “Brillo Boxes”, 1964.
Το φάντασμα της πτώσης της οικίας των Usher στις εγκαταστάσεις
Εστιάζω αποκλειστικά στο διήγημα του Poe “H πτώση του οίκου των Ωσερ», το οποίο συνιστά μια εναλλακτική αφήγηση για τη διαδρομή της μοντέρνας τέχνης και ειδικά για τις σχέσεις μοντέρνου- παράδοσης, αλλά και της ίδιας της ιδεολογικής κρίσης του νεωτερισμού. Εντοπίζω εκείνες τις εγκαταστάσεις –κατοικίες όπου είναι αισθητή η εμπειρία της πτώσης , της διάτμησης, και του γκρεμίσματος. Αναφερόμενος στις αρχιτεκτονικές χειρονομίες του Schwitters, του Jean Pierre Raynaud, του Gordon Matta –Clark και Robert Smithson επιχειρώ να αναδείξω μια εικαστική παράδοση που συνειδητά φέρει την ρήξη στις τυποποιημένες σχεδιαστικές γλώσσες της αρχιτεκτονικής.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Schwitters “Merzbau” 1923-1943/Gordon Matta Clark-“Bronx Floor”, 1972-3 / “Bingo”, 1974 “Splitting”,1974, “office baroque”, 1977/ J.P.Raynaud “La maison”, 1969-1993,/ Joseph Beuys “I lιke America and America likes me”, 1974/ Robert Smithson “Partially buried woodshed”, 1970, “Hotel Palenque”,1969/ Arman, “Conscious Vandalism”, 1975
Καλειδοσκοπικά δωμάτια στην ψυχεδελική τέχνη
Αναφερόμαστε στη σχέση θεάματος και ψυχεδέλειας μέσα από το σχήμα και τις ιδιότητες του καλειδοσκοπίου. Στην συνέχεια με αφορμή τις εγκαταστάσεις των Kusama και Σαμαρά όπως και με τα lights shows προσεγγίζω τους τρόπους που η ψυχεδελική κουλτούρα συντίθεται στην αρχιτεκτονική και ειδικά στον ιδιωτικό χώρο. θα διευκρινίσουμε ότι η επαναστατική πρόθεση στην ψυχεδελική τέχνη είναι ταυτόσημη με την αλλαγή στο πεδίο της οπτικής αντίληψης.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Lucas Samaras, “Mirrored Room”,1966/ Yayoi Kusama –“Infinity Mirror Room (phalli’s field)”, 1965/ 1970/ «Mirror Room”, 1991/ “Fireflies”, 2003/ Jesus Rafael Soto, “Penetrables, 1967/” Brion Gysin “dreamachine”, 1959/ Μark Boyle “ Son et Lumiere”, 1966/ Jianni Colombo, “Structuratione fluida”, 1967/ Ν.Schoffer, “CYSP 1”, 1956 / Davide Boriani, “Ambiente stroboscopico”, 1966/ Jim Lambie, “Zobop”, 1999/ Eva Rothschild, “Within You Without You”, 2002/ “Black Mountainside”, 2001 Olafur Eliasson, «La situazione antispettiva», 2003.
Άπολις : Μακριά από το σπίτι
Στην τελευταία ενότητα αναφέρομαι σ’ έναν ιδιότυπο «αποδραστικό» μοντερνισμό, στον οποίο οι περιπλανήσεις κατέχουν σημαντική θέση. η γενεαλογία μπορεί να βρεθεί στις περιπλανήσεις των σουρεαλιστών και στις derives και detournements των καταστασιακών.
Η όψιμη νεωτερικότητα αντιπροτείνει ένα μοντέλο καλλιτέχνη που ασεβεί απέναντι στους «νόμους» της πόλης, εκτροχιάζεται στην περιφέρεια της ή στις ακόμα παρθένες περιοχές και από κει σχηματίζει την δική του οντότητα πέρα από τους συμμετοχικούς μηχανισμούς της πολιτικής κοινότητας. Αυτή η αναζήτηση θα επισημανθεί με τις μοναχικές διαδρομές του Richard long, Hamish Fulton, Werner Ηerjok, και τις συμβολικές οριοθετήσεις της διαδρομής όπως στην περίπτωση του Carl André. Το διακύβευμα είναι εάν η ιδιωτική σφαίρα επιτρέπει ένα βαθμό ελευθέριας όσο και η αποφασιστική έξοδος από την πόλη.
Eνδεικτικά έργα και φιλμικό υλικό: Dali, “Rainy Taxi”, 1938 / Vito Acconci, «Following Piece», 1969/ Wim Wenders, «Αλίκη στις πόλεις»/ Charlie Chaplin, “Modern Times”, 1936/E. Kienholz, «Back Seat Dodge 38,1964 / Tomoko Takahashi, “ Line out ”, 1996/ Carl Andre “Lever”, 1966/ Ed Ruscha, «Royal Road Test», 1967/CIAM, 1933.
Προτάσεις εργασίας
Διαδικασία
H εργασία ανταποκρίνεται στις ενότητες του μαθήματος. Αρχικά την προτείνετε προφορικά η με κάποιο συνοπτικό σχεδιάγραμμα. Αφού συμφωνήσουμε σε κάθε περίπτωση οφείλετε να έχετε βιβλιογραφικές αναφορές ακόμα και αν οι πηγές σας προέρχονται από το Internet. Επιλέγετε να σχολιάσετε μονάχα ένα έργο από το σύνολο της δουλειάς ενός εικαστικού ή αρχιτέκτονα. Οποιαδήποτε άλλη αναφορά έργου θα συνδέεται και θα παρατίθεται με την κύρια επιλογή.
Γραπτή εργασία μέχρι 2500 λέξεις και όχι λιγότερο από 1000.
ή
Δεκάλεπτη παρουσίαση της μελέτης σας με όποιο τρόπο επιθυμείτε και γραπτή παράδοση της σύνοψης της θέσης σας σε 500 λέξεις.
«Αφηγήσεις της κατοικίας στη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη»
Μάθημα: Κωστής Βελώνης
Περιγραφή του μαθήματος
Το μάθημα επιδιώκει να φανερωθούν οι τρόποι ώστε να συλλογιστεί κανείς την «οικιακότητα», τον ιδιωτικό και οικογενειακό βίο όπως τον αντιλήφθηκαν οι καλλιτεχνικές πρωτοπορίες από τα τέλη του 19 αιώνα καθώς και σ’ολη την ιστορική εξέλιξη της νεωτερικότητας. Εστιάζοντας τόσο στις γενικές αρχές των εικαστικών κινημάτων όσο και σε μεμονωμένες περιπτώσεις καλλιτεχνών κατανοούμε τους λόγους για τους οποίους άλλες φορές ενθαρρύνεται, αμφισβητείται ή και περιφρονείται η κουλτούρα γύρω από την κατοικία. Μέσα από την ιστορία της τέχνης και των εφαρμογών της στο σχεδιασμό, στις εικονογραφήσεις, το κινηματογράφο και γενικότερα στη μαζική παράγωγη του υλικού πολιτισμού δίνω έμφαση στους ρόλους των φύλων μέσα στη κατοικία, στις ιδεολογικές θέσεις πάνω στον καθημερινό βίο του νοικοκυριού, στις ταξικές και κοινωνικές συγκρούσεις της πρωτοπορίας με τις αρχιτεκτονικές νόρμες των κατοικιών του 20 αιώνα. Πως τελικά ο σύζυγος ως «μαχητής» του δημόσιου βίου ορίζει την παραμονή του μέσα στον οίκο και πότε την ακυρώνει;
Άραγε μήπως η ιδέα της «πρωτοπορίας» διαμόρφωσε τα χαρακτηριστικά της βασιζόμενη στην απόρριψη του οικείου, του γνώριμου αλλά και του οικιακού, του χώρου δηλαδή που κάποιος μόνιμα η πρόσκαιρα κατοικεί?
Μια επανεγγραφή της ιστορίας με άξονα την «οικιακότητα» σε ποιους καλλιτέχνες θα αναγνώριζε τη δυνατότητα μιας προφητικής και επίκαιρης κριτικής ισότιμης με την ποικίλη και πιο σύνθετη «δημοκρατικότητα» του τέλους του μοντερνισμού ;
Αυτό που εξετάζω παράλληλα με την «επίσημη» avant garde είναι και μια «προαστιακή θηλυκή νεωτερικότητα» που δίνει έμφαση στις «αξιες» ή στις πολυπλοκότητες της κατοίκησης και της οποίας τα ιχνη μπορουν να βρεθούν ακόμα και πριν την δεκαετία του 70. Αυτές οι σιωπηλές για την αναγνωρισμένη καταγραφή της ιστορίας της τέχνης πολιτισμικές ετερότητες ορίζουν ένα πρόσφατο σχετικά πεδίο έρευνας που μπορεί να ανακατασκευάσει τις γνωστές διαδρομές της μοντέρνας τέχνης και να ενδυναμώσει τις πιο πρόσφατες κατευθύνσεις.
Στη συνέχεια ακολουθεί μια σύντομη παρουσίαση κάθε ενότητας. Στις περισσότερες περιπτώσεις, στην διάρκεια της διάλεξης περιλαμβάνονται περισσότερες ενότητες. Επίσης δεν έχουν απόλυτα χρονολογικό χαρακτήρα, και κάθε φορά αλλάζουν ανάλογα με τις ανάγκες του μαθήματος.
Η διεκδίκηση της μοντέρνας ταυτότητας της νοικοκυράς
Σε αυτή την ενότητα εστιάζουμε στα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα και τις αρχές του 20ου εξετάζοντας τα χαρακτηριστικά της «γυναικείας δημιουργικότητας» μέσα από την διακόσμηση της οικίας. Στόχος είναι να έχουμε μια ξεκάθαρη εικόνα για το πώς εισάγεται το νεωτερικό στοιχείο στις διακοσμητικές τέχνες πριν την ιστορική επισημοποίηση της "μοντέρνας τέχνης». Οι «στρατηγικές» της συζύγου μέσα στον οίκο μας βοηθούν να υποστηρίξουμε την γένεση μιας παράλληλης προς την «επίσημη» avant-garde «προαστιακής νεωτερικότητας» αποκλειστικά γυναικείας, η οποία στηρίζει την σχέση του ιδιώτη με την οικία αντί να την αποδυναμώνει και να εναντιώνεται προς το διακοσμητικό, εμμένοντας σ’ ένα είδος «οικιακής εγκατάστασης».
Ενδεικτικά έργα :Διαφημίσεις πολυκαταστημάτων (Παρίσι, 19ος αιώνας)/ Vuillard, «Οι κίτρινες κουρτίνες», 1893/ M.Cottin, «Les Petits riens», 1896/ Bonnard, “Όρθιο γυμνό» 1919/ Εικονογραφήσεις περιοδικών για τη διακόσμηση(19ος αιωνας)
Αξίες της αστικής οικογένειας στο γαλλικό και αμερικανικό ιμπρεσιονισμό
Αναφερόμαστε στις οικιακές αναπαραστάσεις του καλλιτεχνικού εργαστηρίου μέσα από το έργο των ιμπρεσιονιστών όπου τα όρια ανάμεσα στο χώρο δουλειάς και κατοικίας είναι ασαφή. Εξετάζουμε τις ομοιότητες και τις διάφορες στο γυναίκειο γαλλικό και τον αμερικανικο αντρικό ιμπρεσιονισμό. Eμφαση δίνεται στο έργο του Manet σε σχέση με τους ρόλους των μοντέλων του και τις επιρροές των μεταγενέστερων
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Εικονογραφήσεις για το «Σαλόνι» του Παρισιού/ William Merritt Chase “The hall at Shinnecock”, 1892/ Edmund C.Tarbell, «Girls Reading», 1907/ Mary Cassat, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” 1878/ Berthe Morisot, “Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wigh”, 1875 / Manet, “Olympia”, 1863/ “Portrait d’Emile Zola”, 1868.
Σκανδιναβικές μόδες του κατοικείν : Από τον Carl Larsson στο ΙΚΕΑ
Αναφέρομαι στις πρώτες δημοσιεύσεις του Carl Larsson το 1895 οι οποίες εικονογραφούν την κατοικία της οικογένειας του στην περιοχή Lilla Hyttnas της Σουηδίας. Ο σχεδιασμός εσωτερικών χώρων του Larsson που εκφράζει την ανάγκη για ένα ιδανικό προβιομηχανικό παρελθόν του οποίου η φιλοσοφία εκφράζεται εν μέρει και στην «γραμμή» της ΙΚΕΑ έρχεται να υπογραμμίσει μια κρίση και μια αναβάθμιση απέναντι στον μοντέρνο σχεδιασμό. Συγκρίνουμε το προγενέστερο υλικό με τα εξπρεσιονιστικά και υπαρξιακά δωμάτια του Edward Munch και Vilhelm Hammershoi αντίστοιχα.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Carl Larsson, “Ett hem” 1899/ Edvard Munch, «Το φιλί», 1892/ Vilhelm Hammershοi, «Dust Motes Dancing in Sunlight», 1900/ Σύγχρονες εικαστικές εγκαταστάσεις
«Η χαρά της ζωής» του Μatisse και η τέχνη του κουρασμένου Businessman
Η ζωγραφική του Matisse ανεξάρτητα από τον ριζοσπαστικό χαρακτήρα της τις μέρες του «φοβισμού», συμμετείχε συνειδητά στην επιδιωκόμενη γαλήνια ατμόσφαιρα του οικογενειακού περιβάλλοντος. Ανιχνεύουμε τους κοινούς συνδέσμους ανάμεσα στις ασθένειες της πόλης (νευρασθένεια) και τις διακοσμητικές επιρροές του Μatisse που επιδιώκουν την «ευτυχία» μέσα στο κατοικείν.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Matisse “Στοχασμός (μετά το μπάνιο) 1920-21, “το ροζ atelier” 1911 , «η οικογένεια του ζωγράφου», 1911 / Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, «Το τραγούδι των Βοσκών», 1890.
Προσπερνώντας την οικία στη μοντέρνα γλυπτική: Τακτικές του “ανοίγματος” της κλειστής φόρμας
Σημείο εκκίνησης της ενότητας είναι η εξιστόρηση της σταδιακής κατάργησης του περίκλειστου γλυπτικού όγκου στην μοντέρνα πλαστική έκφραση. Παρουσιάζω συμπτώματα αυτής της διάνοιξης καταδεικνύοντας τις συγγένειες προς μια αρχιτεκτονική σύλληψη της γλυπτικής μέσα από το έργο του Boccioni, του Gabo, του Picasso, του Gonzalez κ.α.
Θα συζητήσουμε τις συνέπειες του ανοίγματος του γλυπτού το οποίο θα επιτρέψει την ανάπτυξη ενός ζωτικού κυριολεκτικού χώρου. Είναι όμως εξίσου σημαντικό να διευκρινίσουμε ποιές είναι οι θεματικές διαδρομές της «μεταφορικής» κατοίκησης μέσα στο εικαστικό έργο.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Umberto Boccioni, “Sviluppo di bottiglia nello spazio”, 1912 / “Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio”, 1913/ ‘ Τραπέζι+ Μπουκάλι + Σπίτια’, 1912/ " La strada entra nella casa", 1911/ “Dinamismo di un cavallo in corsa + case”, 1914–15/ Picasso " Κιθάρα" , 1912 / "Ποτήρι, μαχαίρι και σάντουιτς σ’ ένα τραπέζι ", 1914/ A.G.Bragaglia, «Φιγούρα κατεβαίνοντας τις σκάλες- αυτοπορτραίτο», 1911 /Σπουδή για μια νέα φωτογραφική εικόνα», 1911/ Gabo, “Ογκομετρικός και Στερεομετρικός κύβος”, 1937/ «Δομημένο κεφάλι μίας γυναίκας», 1917/ «Κεφάλι» , 1916.
Οίκος και ταξική συνείδηση στην πικτοριαλιστική και ρεαλιστική φωτογραφία
Μέσα από φωτογραφικό υλικό των τελών του 19ου αιώνα παρέχουμε πληροφορίες για τις ιδεολογικές και αισθητικές προθέσεις στην καταγραφή εσωτερικών χώρων στην εργατική και αστική τάξη. θα τεθούν ζητήματα που αφορούν στο βικτωριανό πρότυπο του κατοικείν όπως και της ρεαλιστικής παράδοσης τη φωτογραφίας στην προσπάθεια της να συγκινήσει την αστική τάξη.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Riis, ”How the other half lives”, 1888/ Lewis Hine, “Tenement, Jewish family”, 1912/ Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Return after Three Days", 1865 / Clarence H. White, “Ring Toss”, 1899
Μια κατοικία για του εκλεκτούς: Τακτικές του αποκλεισμού και κοσμοπολίτικες φιέστες
Εστιάζω στην αμφίσημη σχέση κυβισμού με την διακόσμηση μέσα από μανιφέστα και τις εκθεσιακές επιλογές του κινήματος. Αναφέρομαι διεξοδικά σε τρεις διαφορετικές στρατηγικές του εκθέτειν με το «Maison Cubiste”, τις δραστηριότητες του dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler και τoυ σχεδιαστή μόδας Paul Poiret.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: George Lepape, «Les choses de Paul Poiret vues par George Lepape», 1911/ Φωτογραφικό υλικό από τη γιορτή του Paul Poiret, La mille et deuxieume nuit, 1911/ Raul Dufy, «La Perse», 1911/ Marie Laurencin, «Les gloves», 1937 /Picasso, «Cubiste portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler”,1910/ Braque, “sculpture unique” 1914/ Marevna, «Κυβιστικά ηλιοτρόπια» 1914
Φουτουρισμός και η ηρωική έξοδος από το σπίτι
Εστιάζουμε στην στρατιωτική ορολογία της πρωτοπορίας για να προσδιορίσω τα αίτια της απαξίωσης του οικιακού περιβάλλοντος. Διαφορετικές ερμηνείες της “εμπροσθοφυλακής» από την ιακωβίνικη και τη σοσιαλιστική πρωτοπορία μέχρι την φασιστική πρωτοπορία των φουτουριστών. Αναλύουμε την αναπαράσταση της μαχητικής avant garde στην φουτουριστική τέχνη καθώς τη σχέση των φουτουριστών με τις γυναίκες.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Balla, “Street Light”, 1911/ Severini, « Armored Train in Action » 1915/ Severini “Maternity” 1916/ Felix Valloton, “L’attaque” 1894/ Wassili Kandinsky, Ο Αποχαιρετισμός, 1903.
Το «σοσιαλιστικό αντικείμενο» στους κοινόχρηστους χώρους των μπολσεβίκων
Eξετάζουμε τους τρόπους με τους οποίους αμφισβητήθηκε η ατομική κατοικία την περίοδο της οκτωβριανής επανάστασης. Παρουσιάζω παραλλαγές του οράματος για το συλλογικό κοινωνικό χώρο στην κομουνιστική ουτοπία μέσα από το έργο των ρώσων κονστρουκτιβιστών, σουπρεματιστών και προντουκτιβιστών. Παρατηρούμε τις συνέπειες της εφαρμογής της κοινοκτημοσύνης την σταλινική περίοδο και την επανεξέταση της παρέμβασης της σοβιετικής ιδεολογίας στο ιδιωτικό χώρο μέσα στη σύγχρονη ρώσικη τέχνη. Ειδική αναφορά στο θεωρητικό έργο του Τρότσκι και του Αrvatov για την κατοικία και το αντικείμενο.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Σοβιετικές Αφίσες για την κατοικία/ Gustav Klutsis «Μακέτα κατασκευής», άγνωστη ημερομηνία/ El Lissitzky, “Wolkenbügel”, photomontage (πλατεία Nikitskii στη Μόσχα), 1925/ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy “Light-Space Modulator“, 1922-30/ Aleksandr Rodchenko «Μη-αντικειμενικό γλυπτό αρ.6», 1918/ Vladimir Stenberg «κατασκευή στο χώρο KPS 42 IV»,1919-21/ Vladimir Tatlin “Corner Relief“, 1915/ Ilya Kabakov «The Man Who Flew Into Space From his Apartment», 1968-1996/ “C’est ici que nous vivons”, 1995
Ο σουρεαλισμός και το “κάστρο” : το ασυνείδητο της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής
Σε αυτήν την ενότητα ανατρέχω στην αντιπάθεια των σουρεαλιστών για τη μοντέρνα αρχιτεκτονική. Ξεκινώ από το μανιφέστο του Breton και την προτίμηση του για την τυπολογία του κάστρου ως ένα απελευθερωμένο κοινωνικό χώρο και συνεχίζω με τα παιδικά δωμάτια των τελών του 19 αιώνα που αποτέλεσαν τόπους ανάπτυξης της φαντασίας.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Max Ernst, Une semaine de Bonte /Man Ray, Le chateau de des, 1929/ Jean Cocteau, La belle et la Bête, 1946 /Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 1936/ Dali, Dream of Venus, 1939
Σχεδιασμός εσωτερικών χώρων και η πρακτική της «ενδομήτριας» αρχιτεκτονικής
Διαβάζουμε αποσπάσματα κείμενων που αποδεικνύουν τον ενθουσιασμό του Dali με την art Nouveau και περιγράφουμε τους εσωτερικούς χώρους του Monkton House του Edward James με τον οποίο συνεργάζεται ο Dali. Τα επιχειρήματα του Τζαρά για την «ενδομήτρια αρχιτεκτονική” συνεισφέρουν σε μια συνολική θεώρηση της σουρεαλιστικής αρχιτεκτονικής. Στην συνέχεια ο βιομορφισμός του Roberto Matta παραλληλίζεται με το αρχιτεκτονικό όραμα του Frederick Κiesler για τα οργανικά κτίρια. Το μάθημα συμπληρώνεται με την σύντομη προβολή φιλμικού υλικού που ανιχνεύει την σουρεαλιστική αντίληψη για τους εσωτερικούς χώρους.
Ενδεικτικά έργα και κατοικίες : Edward James, Monkton House, Sussex/ Las Pozas, Xilitla, 50’s/ Giacometti, The palace at 4.a.m, 1932-33/ Frederick Kiesler, Endless House,1926/ Roberto Μatta, mathematique sensible–architecture du temps, 1938/Joseph Cornell, Setting for a Fairy Tale, 1942.
Ιδιωτικότητα και φετιχισμός: αναπαραστάσεις του γυναικείου σώματος στη σουρεαλιστική και ντανταιστική παράδοση
Η αφορμή για το μάθημα είναι οι έκθέσεις «Exposition surealiste des objets» στη Γκαλερί Charles Ratton και η «Exposition Ιnternational du Surrealisme», στη Γκαλερί Beaux Arts, τα 1936 και το 1938 αντίστοιχα. Εμβαθύνουμε στην κάθε συμμετοχή ξεχωριστά, όπως στην Claude Cahun, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp κ.α Στο ίδιο πλαίσιο συσχέτισης με την ιδιωτικότητα αναφερόμαστε στο έργο του Molinier, Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Balthus, στην χορογράφο Maya Deren και στην Βαρόνη Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Claude Cahun, «αυτοπορτραίτo» 1932/ Balthus “Nu avec le chat” 1948/ Dorothea Tanning “Τragic Τable” 1973/ Meret Oppenheim, “Ma gouvernante”,1936/ Marcel Duchamp, “1200 Coal Sacs,1938
Κουκλόσπιτα ενάντια σε μακέτες και η κρυφή κατοικία του Duchamp
Εξετάζω τις σχέσεις ανάμεσα στο “Βoite en valise” του Marcel Duchamp και στο οικογενειακό κουκλόσπιτο της διακοσμήτριας Carrie Stettheimer. Αφηγούμαστε πώς ο ίδιος ο καλλιτέχνης αξιοποίησε την ιδέα της μινιατούρας στα ύστερα έργα του. Στην συνέχεια, αντιπαραθέτω τον κόσμο του γυναικείου κουκλόσπιτου μ’ εκείνο της αρχιτεκτονικής μακέτας, γεφυρώνοντας τις προπολεμικές γυναικείες διακοσμητικές πρακτικές με την όψιμη μοντέρνα φεμινιστική τέχνη.
Έχοντας εξαντλήσει το διάλογο με τα «γούστα» της πνευματικής ελίτ των «μοντέρνων καιρών», καλούμαστε να αναζητήσουμε το μη ορατό αλλά υπαρκτό των «ανεπιθύμητων» εμπειριών κοιτώντας την ιστορία ξανά μέσα από την «κρυμμένη κατοικία», εκείνης της Stettheimer που ο Duchamp της είχε δωρίσει μια μινιατούρα του «γυμνού που κατεβαίνει γυμνό τις σκάλες».
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Marcel Duchamp , "Nu descendant un escalier αρ.2” , 1912”, / “Boite –en- valise”, 1941/ “Fresh Widow”, 1920/ Carrie Stettheimer “dollshouse”, 1916-35 / Florine Stettheimer “Portrait of my sister Carrie with Dollhouse”, 1923 /Womanhouse project, 1972/ Miriam Shapiro και Sherry Brody “Dollshouse”, 1972.
Το σώμα ως κατοικία στη μεταπολεμική τέχνη : ανάμεσα στην προστασία και την απειλή
Σε αυτή την ενότητα στοχεύω να αναδείξω την συγγένεια μεταξύ οικίας και εγκατάστασης. Εστιάζω στην μεταπολεμική γλυπτική όπου το ανθρώπινο σώμα μετα τον δεύτερο παγκόσμιο πόλεμο αντιμετωπίζεται ως αρχιτεκτονικός χώρος, κέλυφος, οίκος που προσδίδει μια συνθήκη αυτοαναφορικότητας και εκφέρει στοιχεία περισυλλογής και απομόνωσης. Με αντικείμενο τις πρακτικές της πρωτοπορίας στο θέμα της ιδιωτικής κατοικίας, θίγω το ζήτημα της οριοθέτησης της αρχιτεκτονικής μορφής μέσα από το εγγενές οικείο κέλυφος του ανθρώπινου σώματος.
Ενδεικτικά έργα :Joseph Beuys, “Plight”, 1964-72 / Dubuffet, “Closerie Falbala” , 1971-1976/ Per Inge Bjorlo, “Indre romV”, 1991 / Mario Merz, “Igloo di Giap”, 1968.
Μέσα στην οικία : Ο θρίαμβος της τηλεόρασης και η υπεροχή της «αμερικάνικης» κουζίνας στη μεταπολεμική γλυπτική
Σε αυτό το μάθημα προσπαθώ να αποδείξω με ποιους τρόπους το μοντέρνοo ύφος του εσωτερικού χώρου της οικίας λειτούργησε καταλυτικά για την εθνική ταυτότητα της αμερικάνικης κοινωνίας, και συγκεκριμένα πώς η αναβάθμιση της μεταπολεμικής κουζίνας χρησίμευε για τις ιδεολογικές διαφωνίες καπιταλισμού –κομμουνισμού.
Με ευκολία συμπεραίνουμε ότι η έννοια της κατοικίας μεταπολεμικά προχωρά σε μια αναθεώρηση της απομονωμένης της ταυτότητας και εμπλέκεται σε ιδέες που στοχεύουν στη μεταμόρφωση της από χώρο διαβίωσης σε τόπο αναψυχής και διασκέδασης.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Εdwardo Paolozzi “It’s a psychological Fact Pleasure Helps Your Disposition”, 1948/“Aμερικάνικος τρόπος ζωής», Πάρκο Sokolniki, Μόσχα, 1959/ Richard Hamilton «Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”, 1956/ Gerhard Richter, Konrand Lueng “Leben mit pop-eine demonstration fur den kapitalistischen realismus”, 1963/ Vostell «TV-Décoll/age αρ. 1», 1958-1961/ «Concrete TV Paris» (1974-81,/ Andy Warhol, “Brillo Boxes”, 1964.
Το φάντασμα της πτώσης της οικίας των Usher στις εγκαταστάσεις
Εστιάζω αποκλειστικά στο διήγημα του Poe “H πτώση του οίκου των Ωσερ», το οποίο συνιστά μια εναλλακτική αφήγηση για τη διαδρομή της μοντέρνας τέχνης και ειδικά για τις σχέσεις μοντέρνου- παράδοσης, αλλά και της ίδιας της ιδεολογικής κρίσης του νεωτερισμού. Εντοπίζω εκείνες τις εγκαταστάσεις –κατοικίες όπου είναι αισθητή η εμπειρία της πτώσης , της διάτμησης, και του γκρεμίσματος. Αναφερόμενος στις αρχιτεκτονικές χειρονομίες του Schwitters, του Jean Pierre Raynaud, του Gordon Matta –Clark και Robert Smithson επιχειρώ να αναδείξω μια εικαστική παράδοση που συνειδητά φέρει την ρήξη στις τυποποιημένες σχεδιαστικές γλώσσες της αρχιτεκτονικής.
Ενδεικτικά έργα : Schwitters “Merzbau” 1923-1943/Gordon Matta Clark-“Bronx Floor”, 1972-3 / “Bingo”, 1974 “Splitting”,1974, “office baroque”, 1977/ J.P.Raynaud “La maison”, 1969-1993,/ Joseph Beuys “I lιke America and America likes me”, 1974/ Robert Smithson “Partially buried woodshed”, 1970, “Hotel Palenque”,1969/ Arman, “Conscious Vandalism”, 1975
Καλειδοσκοπικά δωμάτια στην ψυχεδελική τέχνη
Αναφερόμαστε στη σχέση θεάματος και ψυχεδέλειας μέσα από το σχήμα και τις ιδιότητες του καλειδοσκοπίου. Στην συνέχεια με αφορμή τις εγκαταστάσεις των Kusama και Σαμαρά όπως και με τα lights shows προσεγγίζω τους τρόπους που η ψυχεδελική κουλτούρα συντίθεται στην αρχιτεκτονική και ειδικά στον ιδιωτικό χώρο. θα διευκρινίσουμε ότι η επαναστατική πρόθεση στην ψυχεδελική τέχνη είναι ταυτόσημη με την αλλαγή στο πεδίο της οπτικής αντίληψης.
Ενδεικτικά έργα: Lucas Samaras, “Mirrored Room”,1966/ Yayoi Kusama –“Infinity Mirror Room (phalli’s field)”, 1965/ 1970/ «Mirror Room”, 1991/ “Fireflies”, 2003/ Jesus Rafael Soto, “Penetrables, 1967/” Brion Gysin “dreamachine”, 1959/ Μark Boyle “ Son et Lumiere”, 1966/ Jianni Colombo, “Structuratione fluida”, 1967/ Ν.Schoffer, “CYSP 1”, 1956 / Davide Boriani, “Ambiente stroboscopico”, 1966/ Jim Lambie, “Zobop”, 1999/ Eva Rothschild, “Within You Without You”, 2002/ “Black Mountainside”, 2001 Olafur Eliasson, «La situazione antispettiva», 2003.
Άπολις : Μακριά από το σπίτι
Στην τελευταία ενότητα αναφέρομαι σ’ έναν ιδιότυπο «αποδραστικό» μοντερνισμό, στον οποίο οι περιπλανήσεις κατέχουν σημαντική θέση. η γενεαλογία μπορεί να βρεθεί στις περιπλανήσεις των σουρεαλιστών και στις derives και detournements των καταστασιακών.
Η όψιμη νεωτερικότητα αντιπροτείνει ένα μοντέλο καλλιτέχνη που ασεβεί απέναντι στους «νόμους» της πόλης, εκτροχιάζεται στην περιφέρεια της ή στις ακόμα παρθένες περιοχές και από κει σχηματίζει την δική του οντότητα πέρα από τους συμμετοχικούς μηχανισμούς της πολιτικής κοινότητας. Αυτή η αναζήτηση θα επισημανθεί με τις μοναχικές διαδρομές του Richard long, Hamish Fulton, Werner Ηerjok, και τις συμβολικές οριοθετήσεις της διαδρομής όπως στην περίπτωση του Carl André. Το διακύβευμα είναι εάν η ιδιωτική σφαίρα επιτρέπει ένα βαθμό ελευθέριας όσο και η αποφασιστική έξοδος από την πόλη.
Eνδεικτικά έργα και φιλμικό υλικό: Dali, “Rainy Taxi”, 1938 / Vito Acconci, «Following Piece», 1969/ Wim Wenders, «Αλίκη στις πόλεις»/ Charlie Chaplin, “Modern Times”, 1936/E. Kienholz, «Back Seat Dodge 38,1964 / Tomoko Takahashi, “ Line out ”, 1996/ Carl Andre “Lever”, 1966/ Ed Ruscha, «Royal Road Test», 1967/CIAM, 1933.
Προτάσεις εργασίας
Διαδικασία
H εργασία ανταποκρίνεται στις ενότητες του μαθήματος. Αρχικά την προτείνετε προφορικά η με κάποιο συνοπτικό σχεδιάγραμμα. Αφού συμφωνήσουμε σε κάθε περίπτωση οφείλετε να έχετε βιβλιογραφικές αναφορές ακόμα και αν οι πηγές σας προέρχονται από το Internet. Επιλέγετε να σχολιάσετε μονάχα ένα έργο από το σύνολο της δουλειάς ενός εικαστικού ή αρχιτέκτονα. Οποιαδήποτε άλλη αναφορά έργου θα συνδέεται και θα παρατίθεται με την κύρια επιλογή.
Γραπτή εργασία μέχρι 2500 λέξεις και όχι λιγότερο από 1000.
ή
Δεκάλεπτη παρουσίαση της μελέτης σας με όποιο τρόπο επιθυμείτε και γραπτή παράδοση της σύνοψης της θέσης σας σε 500 λέξεις.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Βιβλιογραφία
ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΙΑΣ ΤΜΗΜΑ ΑΡΧΙΤΕΚΤΟΝΩΝ ΜΗΧΑΝΙΚΩΝ ΧΕΙΜΕΡΙΝΟ ΕΞΑΜΗΝΟ 2009-2010
«Αφηγήσεις της κατοικίας στη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη»
Μάθημα: Κωστής Βελώνης
Βιβλιογραφία
Agrest, Diana, Conway, Patricia, Weisman, Leslie Canes, (επιμ.) The Sex of Architecture, (Νέα Υόρκη: Harry N.Abrams, 1996)
Allington, Edward, "The Ride Stripped Bare", Frieze 56, (Iανoυάριος-Φεβρουάριος 2001): 83- 87.
Anger, Jenny, “Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900-1915”, Not At Home (επιμέλεια) Christopher Reed (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1989) :130-146.
Aynsley, Jeremy, “Displaying Designs for the Domestic Interior in Europe and America 1850-1950”, Imagined Interiors: representing the domestic interior since the Renaissance (επιμ.) Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, Harriet McKay (Λονδινο: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2006):190-215.
Bach, Teja Friedrich, Brancusi, photo reflexion, (Παρίσι: Edition du Regard, Didier Impert Fine Arts, 1991):8.
Bachelard, Gaston, La poetique de l’espace (Παρίσι : PUF, 1957).
Baydar, Gulsum και Heynen, Hilde (επιμ.) Negotiating Domesticity :Spatial Constructions of Gender in Modern Architecture (Λονδίνο, Νέα Υόρκη:Routledge, 2005).
Bellaigue, Marthilde, "An Artist and an Architect: The space Rebeyrolle at Eymoutiers", Museum International 196, αρ.4, τομ. ΧLIX (1997) : 30-34.
Bennet, Tony, The birth of the Museum (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 1995)
Berry, Francesca, « Lived perspectives:the art of the French nineteenth-century interior”, Imagined Interiors:representing the domestic interior since the Renaissance (επιμ.) Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, Harriet McKay (Λονδινο: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2006):160-183.
Boccioni, U., Scritti editi e inediti (Μιλάνο: Feltrinelli, 1971)
Bochner, Mel, "The Serial Attitude." Artforum 4, τομ. VI (Δεκέμβριος 1967) : 28-33.
Borden, Iain, Rendell, Jane, (επιμ.) InterSections, Architectural Histories and Critical theories (Λονδίνο : Routledge, 2000).
Bois, Yve-Alain, "the Sculptural Opaque", Substance 31 (1981) : 23-48.
Alain-Bois, Yves, Rosalind Krauss, L’informe, mode d’emploi, (Παρίσι : Centre d’art et de culture Georges –Pompidou, 1996).
Buck-Morss, Susan, "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe", October 73, (Καλοκαίρι 95): 3-26.
Βλάχος, Γιώργος Σ., «Ποπ, όπως ο ήχος της φτηνής σαμπάνιας», Panopticon, τευχ.00, (2002).
Brighton, Andrew, Flogging Dead Horses, de-, dis-, ex-. Ex-vacating Modernism, επιμ. Alex Coles & Richard Bentley (BACKless Books, 1996, Λονδινο): 1-2.
Broude, Norma, Garrard, Mary D., (επιμ.) The Power of Feminist Art, the American Movement of the 1970's, History and impact (Νέα Υόρκη : Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the plot: Design and intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Brewer, John, Porter, Roy (επιμ.), Consumption and the World of Goods, (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 1993).
Βrown, Theοdore, The work of G.Rietveld Architect, (Utrecht : A.W.Bruna and Zoon, 1958).
Briosi Sandro, Hillenaar, Henk (επιμ.), Vitalite et contradictions de l’avant-garde, Italie-France 1909-1924, (Paris:José Corti, 1988).
Buchanan Peter, «Brancusi's New Studio», Architecture, αρ. 4 (Απρίλιος 1997): 77-79.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., "Cargo and Cult, the displays of Thomas Hirschhorn", Artforum XL αρ.3 , (Νοέμβριος 2001) : 109-114.
Cardot, Emile, L’Art au foyer domestique (Παρίσι: Renouard, 1884).
Cahun, Claude, Ecrits, (Παρίσι: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 2002).
Causey, Andrew, Sculpture since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Casey, Edward S., Getting Back into Place, (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Century, Dan, “Brion Gysin and His Wonderful Dreamachine” www. legendsmagazine.net/105/brion.htm
Cooke, Lynne, Wollen, Peter, (επιμέλεια), Visual Display Culture: Beyond Appearances, DIA Center(Νέα Υόρκη: The New Press, 1995).
Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity : Μodern Αrchitecτure as Mass Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts :MIT Press, 1994).
---,(επιμ.) Sexuality & Space, (Νέα Υόρκη: Princeton Papers on Αrchitecture, 1992).
Conrads, Ulrich, Μανιφέστα και προγράμματα της αρχιτεκτονικής του 20 αιώνα. (Αθήνα: Επίκουρος, 1977).
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Παρίσι : G. Crès και Cie, 1925).
---, L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (Παρίσι: G. Crès, 1925).
---, Vers une architecture ((Παρίσι : Crès et Cie, 1923).
Crary, Jonathan, "Spectacle, attention, counter-memory", October 50 (Φθινόπωρο 1989) : 96-107.
---, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990).
---, Suspensions of Perception, Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2001).
Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Clark, T.J, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 1984)
Clarke, Alison J., Tupperware, The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
Davilla, Thierry, «Une oeuvre de destruction», Les cahiers du Musée Νational d’art Moderne, Centre Pompidou (Χειμώνας. 2004/2005).
Debord, Guy, « Positions situationnistes sur la circulation”, Internationale situationniste, Internationale Situationniste 3, (Δεκέμβριος 1959), τρίτη έκδοση ( Paris: Fayard, 1997) : 104-105.
---, Η Κοινωνία του Θεάματος, μετ. Π.Τσαχαγέας-Ν.Β.Αλεξίου (Αθήνα: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1986).
---, Kotànyi, Vaneigem, «Sur la commune», Internationale Situationniste,12(1969).www.acontrecourant.org/acc2/index.php?page=commune.
O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986).
Docherty J.Linda, “Model families: The domesticated Studio Pictures of William Merritt Chase and Edmund Tarbell”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):48-64.
---, Theorising Modernism, Visual art and the Critical Tradition, (Νέα Υόρκη: Columbia University Press, 1994).
De Duve, Thierry, “Ex Situ”, LES CAHIERS du Musée National d’art Moderne 27 (φθινόπωρο 1989) : 39-55.
---, Kant After Duchamp, (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: 1996).
Eisenman, Peter D., "Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition." Design Quarterly 78-79 (1970): 1-5.
Efrat, Zvi, Fausch, Deborah, Singley, Paulette, El-Khoury, Rodolphe, (επιμ) Architecture: In Fashion (Νέα Υόρκη: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).
Etincelle, Carnet d'un mondain, vol. I, (Paris: Rouveyre, 1881-82).
Krzysztof Fijalkowski “‘ Un salon au fond d’un lac’, The domestic spaces of surrealism” στο Mical, Thomas (επιμ.) Surrealism and architecture, (London : Routledge, 2005):11-30
Facos Michelle, “The Ideal Swedish Home :Carl Larsson’s Lilla Hyttnas”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):81-91.
Farquharson, Alex, «Drastic Plastic», Frieze 68 (2001).
Focillon, Henri, Η ζωή των μορφών, μτφ. Α. Κούρι, (Αθήνα : Νεφέλη, 1982).
Foster, Hal, “The Archive without Museums”, October 77, (Kαλοκαίρι 1996) : 97-119.
---, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002).
---, Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (Λονδίνο και Νέα Υόρκη: Verso, 2002).
Francis, Mark, «Tune in, turn on, light up..» Tate etc. αρ.4, www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/summeroflove.htm
Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood”, Art Forum, Vol.V, αρ.10 (καλοκαίρι 1967): 13-23.
Frizot Michel, Dominique Paini, Sculpter photographier photographie sculpture (Παρίσι: Marval, 1991).
Frechuret, Maurice, Le mou et ses formes :essai sur quelques catégories de la sculpture, (Παρίσι: ESBA, 1993).
Geiger, John, Chapel of Extreme Experience: a Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Νέα Υόρκη: Soft Skull Press, 2004).
Giedon, Sigfried, Space, time and Architecture : The Growth of a new Tradition, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941).
Gintz, Claude, “Architecture et postminimalisme”. Revue d’esthétique 29 (1996).
Giovanni, Antonucci, Chonache del theatro futurista, (Roma: Abete, 1975).
Godin, Christian, La Totalité realisée, Les arts at la littérature (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1997).
Gray Noel, «The kaleidoscope: Shake, Rattle and Roll”, The Australian Journal of Media&Culture, αρ.6(1991)www. mcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/6.2/Gray.html
Greenberg, Clement, Recentness of sculpture, American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, 1967).
Greenberg, R., Ferguson, B. W., Nairne, S., (επιμ.), Thinking About Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Girst, Thomas ”Those objects of Obscure Desires :Marcel Duchamp and his Shop Windows στο Grunenberg, Christoph, Hollein Max (επιμ.), Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Schirn Kunstahalle Frankfurt και Tate Liverpool( Frankfurt , Liverpool :Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2002).
Grunenberg, Chrιstoph, Harris, Jonathan, (επιμέλεια), Summer of Love, psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 60’s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press +Tate Liverpool, 2005).
Hahn, Till, “L’amour du verre”, Museum 172 (1991) : 202-205
Hoffmann, Gerhard, "Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe," Poe Studies XII, αρ.1 (Ιούνιος 1979) www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1979101.htm
Hainard, Jacques, Kaehr, Roland, Objects Prétextes, Objects Manipulés (Neuchâtel: Musée d’ethnographie, 1984).
Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, (επιμ.), Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Cambridge: Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992).
Hergott, Fabrice, «Plight», Joseph Beuys. (Paris: Musee national d’art moderne: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994).
Highmore, Ben, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 2002).
Hirst, Paul, “Foucault and Architecture”, AA Files 26 (1993) : 25-60.
Hirst, Lisa, “Dressing the part, Workwear for the Home 1953-1965”, Things 9 (Xειμώνας 98-99): 25-49.
Hulten, Pontus (επιμ.) Futurismo & Futuristi (Milano: Fabbri Bompiani, 1986).
Jones, Amelia, Irrational Modernism, a Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2004)
Jones, Jonathan, A House is not a Home, Frieze 55, (νοεμ -δεκ 2000 ) :84-89.
---, "Species of Spaces -Mike Nelson. Frieze 53, (Kαλοκαίρι 2000).
Joselit, David, Infinite Regress, Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003).
Judd, Donald, “Specific objects” Arts Yearbook 8. (1965) : 74-82
Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, μτφρ. Catherine Porter. (Νέα Υόρκη: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Kabakov, Ilya, On the total installation (Bonn: Cantz verlag, 1995).
------, Tupitsyn, Margarita, Tupitsyn, Victor, “Conversation About Installation”, Art Journal 58, αρ. 4, (χειμώνας 99): 62–73.
Kachur, Lewis, Displaying the Marvelous, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).
Klimasmith, Betsy. At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005 ) , ειδικα τα κεφ. the “Tenement home” και “The Apartment as Utopia”.
Κοτιώνης, Ζήσης. Πες, πού είναι η Αθήνα. Προβολές στην τοπογραφία της Αττικής (Αθήνα : Άγρα, 2006).
Kiaer, Christina, Imagine no Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism(Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2005).
Kiaer, Christina, « The Short life of the Equal Woman », 2009, Tate ETC Magazine, www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue15/russian.htm
Krauss, Eva, «Plaidoyer pour une archisculpture » L’architecture d’aujourd’ hui, 349 (Νοεμ-Δεκ. 2003): 58-63
Krauss, Rosalind. E., The Originality of the Avant–Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 1986).
---, Passages in Modern Sculpture,(Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1977).
Kwinter, Sanford, “Virtual City , or the Wiring and Waning of the World”, Assemblage 29, (Απρίλιος 1996) : 86-101.
----, Architectures of Time, Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2001)
Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (Νέα Υόρκη: Harper & Row 1971)
Leigh, Christian, “Home is where the heart is”, Flash art 145, (Μάρτιος-Απρίλιος 89).
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laokoon: Oder uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, (Βερολίνο :1766).
Loos, Adolf, Spoken into the Void, Collected Essays 1897-1900, μτφ. Jane O. Newman και John H. Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982).
Λοϊζίδη, Νίκη, Απόγειο και κρίση της πρωτοποριακής ιδεολογίας ( Αθήνα: Νεφέλη, 1992).
Lippard, Lucy, Pop Art (Λονδίνο : Thames and Hudson, 1966).
Giovani Lista , ‘Εναέρια Άποψη και φουτουριστική Αεροζωγραφική: Μια μεταφυσική του χώρου» στο Η κατάκτηση του αέρα , (Θεσσαλονίκη:ΚΜΣΤ, 2003):89-115
Lyotard, J.F. “Les immateriaux”, Art & Text 17 (1985).
Mahon, Alyce “Displaying the Body, Surrealism’s Geography of Pleasure” στο Wood, Ghislaine (επιμ.) Surreal Things, Surrealism and Design (London : Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007).
Mahoney, Robert, “La révolte des objets: John Armleder et un postmortem moderne”, Artstudio 19 (Χειμώνας 1990) : 78-89.
Μαρινέττι, Μανιφέστα του Φουτουρισμού (Αθήνα: Αιγόκερος, 1987).
Massey, Ann, “The Emergence of Interior Decoration as a Profession”, Interior Design of the 20th Century, (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1990).
Meleaf, Janine, "The House that Carrie Built: The Stettheimer Doll's House of the 1920s". Art & Design 51 (Νοεμβριος 1996) : 76-81.
Mehgham, Rod, "Inner Visions", Tate Magazine, issue 23, (2000):38-42.
Moholy–Nagy, Laszlo, Painting, Photography, Film, μετ. J. Seligman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1969).
Michelson, Annette, “Where is your rupture?” Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk” , October 56 (Καλοκαίρι 1991): 43–63.
Ντε Μικέλι, Μ. Οι πρωτοπορίες της τέχνης του εικοστού αιώνα (Αθήνα: Οδυσσέας, 1983).
Morris, Frances, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, (Λονδίνο: Tate Gallery, 1993).
Morton Pat, "A visit to Womenhouse", Architecture of the Everyday, (επιμ.) Steven Harris, Deborah Berke (Νέα Υόρκη : Princeton Architectural Press, 1997): 166-179.
Miessen, Markus, “Wondering through the chasms of opportunity”, Contemporary 21, αρ. 87 (2006): 16-17.
Millet, Catherine, “Architectures de Dubuffet”, Art Press 45 (1981) : 33-37.
Mulholland, Neil, “Use your illusions”, Tate etc. αρ.4 , (Καλοκαίρι, 2005). www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/summeroflove2.htm
McNeil, Peter "Designing Women : Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Designer, c 1890-1940 Art History 17, αρ. 4, (34), (Δεκέμβριος 1994) : 631-57.
Nevins, Deborah, "The Triumph of Flora: Women and American Landscape, 1890-1935, Antiques 127 (Απρίλιος 1985) : 64-69.
Niderst, Alain, "Esthetique et materialisme a la fin du siecle", Dix-Huitieme Siecle, αρ. 24 (1992) :189-197.
Ørskou, Gitte, « Inside the Spectacle, Olafur Eliasson. Minding the world», ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004).
Ottmann, Klaus, “Jessica Stockholder”. The Journal of Contemporary Art 5 (Aνοιξη/Kαλοκαίρι 1991) : 100-107.
Παπανικολάου Mιλτιάδης (επιμ.), Πίσω από το μαύρο τετράγωνο (Θεσσαλονίκη : ΚΜΣΤ, 2002).
Parent Beatrice, «Mario Merz: Le soufle de la liberté». Artstudio 13 : 52-63.
Pollock , Griselda, « On Mary Cassatt’s reading le figaro or the case of the missing women » στο Looking back to the future eesays on art, life and death ( Amsterdam:G+B Arts International , 2001):227-273
Piano, Renzo, “Atelier Brancusi a Parigi” Ottagono 124 (Οκτώβριος 1997).
Read, Herbert, Ιστορία της Μοντέρνας γλυπτικής, μτφρ. Μ.Λαμπράκη-Πλάκα (Υποδομή, Αθήνα, 1974).
Reed, Chistopher, "Domestic Strife". Tate Modern 21 (2000) : 51-54.
Revel, Judith, “L’archive au present: pour une généalogie de l’infime”. Οmnibus, ειδικό τεύχος για Documenta X, (Οκτώβριος 97).
Romain, Antoinette Le Normand, Rodin en 1900: l'exposition de l'Alma (Παρίσι : Musée du Luxembourg, Musée Rodin, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001).
Robinson, Joyce Henri « Hi Honey, I’m Home» : Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic » Not At Home (επιμ.) Christopher Reed (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1989) :98-112
Rosenthall, Mark, Installation Art, From Duchamp to Holzer (Munich : Prestel verlag, 2003).
Rossler, Beate, Privacies (Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2004).
Riley, Richard, «Μεταμόρφωση: νέες μορφές στη βρετανική τέχνη 1957-1971», στο Μεταμόρφωση, Βρετανική τέχνη της δεκαετίας του 60, (Άνδρος: Iδρυμα Βασίλη και Ελίζας Γουλανδρή, Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, 2005).
Sadler, Simon, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: ΜΙΤ Press, 1998).
Shapiro, Miriam, "Recalling Womanhouse". Women's Studies Quaterly 15 (Άνοιξη,/Καλοκαίρι, 1987): 25-30.
--- " The Education of Women as Artists :Project Womanhouse". Art Journal 31 (Άνοιξη 1972): 268-270.
Shapiro, Laura, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Νέα Υόρκη: The Viking Press, 2004
Shelley, Rice, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Dern, Cindy Sherman, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999)
Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust A History of Walking (Λονδίνο: Verso, 2001).
Spigel, Lynn, “The suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America,”
---, “Installing the television set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space 1948-1955”. Camera Obscura 16 (Μάρτιος 1988) : 11-48
Staniszewski, Mary Anne, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998)
Stephen Philips “Introjection and Projection : Frederick Kiesler and his dream machine” στο Mical, Thomas (επιμ.) Surrealism and architecture, (London : Routledge, 2005):140-155
Stewart, Susan, On longing, narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)
Sykora, Katharina “Merchandise Temptress : The surrealist Enticements of the Display Window” στο Grunenberg, Chrιstoph, Hollein Max (επιμ.), Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Schirn Kunstahalle Frankfurt και Tate Liverpool (Frankfurt , Liverpool :Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2002) .
Tabart, Marielle, Monod-Fontaine, Isabelle, Brancusi Photographe (Παρίσι : M.N.A.M, Centre G.Pompidou , 1979).
Taylor, Brandon, The Art of Today, (Λονδίνο: Everyman Art Library,1995).
Tiersten, Lisa, "The Chic Interior and the Feminine Modern: Home decorating as High Art in Turn-of-the Century Paris”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):18-32.
Τροβά, Βασω (επιμ.), Από ποια πλευρά του τοίχου ; Ζητήματα φύλων στο σχεδιασμό του Χώρου (Βόλος: Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας, 2008).
Τουρνικιώτης, Παναγιώτης, Ιστοριογραφία της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής (Αθήνα: Αλεξάνδρεια, 2002).
---------, «Τα μνημεία και τ’αυτοκίνητα στο Vers une architecture του Le Corbusier», Χρονικά Αισθητικής, τομ.37-38 (1997-1998):85-98.
---------, “Ιδεαλισμός και ορθολογισμός, η αντίληψη της αρχιτεκτονικής του le Corbusier” , Δελτίο Συλλόγου Αρχιτεκτόνων, αρ. 16 (Ιανουάριος –Φεβρουάριος 1988):43-47.
Tsutsui, William, Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of The King of Monsters (Λονδίνο : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Umbro, Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1973).
Van Zeijl, Gerard, The Architecture of Dwelling : A History of a(ir)rationality Bulwark, Dwelling as Figure of Thought, (επιμέλεια Hans Cornelissen) (Amsterdam : SUN, 2005): 103-129.
Vidler, Antony, The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).
---, Warped Space: Art Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2000).
---, “Splitting the difference”. Artforum, (Ιουν.2003) : 35-36.
Wakefield, Neville «Yucatan is Elsewhere, On Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque». Parkett 43 (1995) : 133
Weil, B., “Remarks on Installations and Changes in Time Dimensions”, Flash Art 162 Vol. XXV (Ιανούαριος/Φεβρουάριος 1992) : 104-109
Whiting, Cecile, A Taste for Pop,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Widdis, Emma, Visions of a New Land, (New Haven και Λονδίνο:Yale University, 2003).
Ghislaine Wood, ”The Illusory Interior” στο Wood, Ghislaine (επιμ.) Surreal Things, Surrealism and Design (London : Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007):39-57.
«Αφηγήσεις της κατοικίας στη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη»
Μάθημα: Κωστής Βελώνης
Βιβλιογραφία
Agrest, Diana, Conway, Patricia, Weisman, Leslie Canes, (επιμ.) The Sex of Architecture, (Νέα Υόρκη: Harry N.Abrams, 1996)
Allington, Edward, "The Ride Stripped Bare", Frieze 56, (Iανoυάριος-Φεβρουάριος 2001): 83- 87.
Anger, Jenny, “Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900-1915”, Not At Home (επιμέλεια) Christopher Reed (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1989) :130-146.
Aynsley, Jeremy, “Displaying Designs for the Domestic Interior in Europe and America 1850-1950”, Imagined Interiors: representing the domestic interior since the Renaissance (επιμ.) Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, Harriet McKay (Λονδινο: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2006):190-215.
Bach, Teja Friedrich, Brancusi, photo reflexion, (Παρίσι: Edition du Regard, Didier Impert Fine Arts, 1991):8.
Bachelard, Gaston, La poetique de l’espace (Παρίσι : PUF, 1957).
Baydar, Gulsum και Heynen, Hilde (επιμ.) Negotiating Domesticity :Spatial Constructions of Gender in Modern Architecture (Λονδίνο, Νέα Υόρκη:Routledge, 2005).
Bellaigue, Marthilde, "An Artist and an Architect: The space Rebeyrolle at Eymoutiers", Museum International 196, αρ.4, τομ. ΧLIX (1997) : 30-34.
Bennet, Tony, The birth of the Museum (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 1995)
Berry, Francesca, « Lived perspectives:the art of the French nineteenth-century interior”, Imagined Interiors:representing the domestic interior since the Renaissance (επιμ.) Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, Harriet McKay (Λονδινο: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2006):160-183.
Boccioni, U., Scritti editi e inediti (Μιλάνο: Feltrinelli, 1971)
Bochner, Mel, "The Serial Attitude." Artforum 4, τομ. VI (Δεκέμβριος 1967) : 28-33.
Borden, Iain, Rendell, Jane, (επιμ.) InterSections, Architectural Histories and Critical theories (Λονδίνο : Routledge, 2000).
Bois, Yve-Alain, "the Sculptural Opaque", Substance 31 (1981) : 23-48.
Alain-Bois, Yves, Rosalind Krauss, L’informe, mode d’emploi, (Παρίσι : Centre d’art et de culture Georges –Pompidou, 1996).
Buck-Morss, Susan, "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe", October 73, (Καλοκαίρι 95): 3-26.
Βλάχος, Γιώργος Σ., «Ποπ, όπως ο ήχος της φτηνής σαμπάνιας», Panopticon, τευχ.00, (2002).
Brighton, Andrew, Flogging Dead Horses, de-, dis-, ex-. Ex-vacating Modernism, επιμ. Alex Coles & Richard Bentley (BACKless Books, 1996, Λονδινο): 1-2.
Broude, Norma, Garrard, Mary D., (επιμ.) The Power of Feminist Art, the American Movement of the 1970's, History and impact (Νέα Υόρκη : Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the plot: Design and intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Brewer, John, Porter, Roy (επιμ.), Consumption and the World of Goods, (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 1993).
Βrown, Theοdore, The work of G.Rietveld Architect, (Utrecht : A.W.Bruna and Zoon, 1958).
Briosi Sandro, Hillenaar, Henk (επιμ.), Vitalite et contradictions de l’avant-garde, Italie-France 1909-1924, (Paris:José Corti, 1988).
Buchanan Peter, «Brancusi's New Studio», Architecture, αρ. 4 (Απρίλιος 1997): 77-79.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., "Cargo and Cult, the displays of Thomas Hirschhorn", Artforum XL αρ.3 , (Νοέμβριος 2001) : 109-114.
Cardot, Emile, L’Art au foyer domestique (Παρίσι: Renouard, 1884).
Cahun, Claude, Ecrits, (Παρίσι: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 2002).
Causey, Andrew, Sculpture since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Casey, Edward S., Getting Back into Place, (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Century, Dan, “Brion Gysin and His Wonderful Dreamachine” www. legendsmagazine.net/105/brion.htm
Cooke, Lynne, Wollen, Peter, (επιμέλεια), Visual Display Culture: Beyond Appearances, DIA Center(Νέα Υόρκη: The New Press, 1995).
Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity : Μodern Αrchitecτure as Mass Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts :MIT Press, 1994).
---,(επιμ.) Sexuality & Space, (Νέα Υόρκη: Princeton Papers on Αrchitecture, 1992).
Conrads, Ulrich, Μανιφέστα και προγράμματα της αρχιτεκτονικής του 20 αιώνα. (Αθήνα: Επίκουρος, 1977).
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Παρίσι : G. Crès και Cie, 1925).
---, L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (Παρίσι: G. Crès, 1925).
---, Vers une architecture ((Παρίσι : Crès et Cie, 1923).
Crary, Jonathan, "Spectacle, attention, counter-memory", October 50 (Φθινόπωρο 1989) : 96-107.
---, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990).
---, Suspensions of Perception, Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2001).
Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Clark, T.J, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 1984)
Clarke, Alison J., Tupperware, The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
Davilla, Thierry, «Une oeuvre de destruction», Les cahiers du Musée Νational d’art Moderne, Centre Pompidou (Χειμώνας. 2004/2005).
Debord, Guy, « Positions situationnistes sur la circulation”, Internationale situationniste, Internationale Situationniste 3, (Δεκέμβριος 1959), τρίτη έκδοση ( Paris: Fayard, 1997) : 104-105.
---, Η Κοινωνία του Θεάματος, μετ. Π.Τσαχαγέας-Ν.Β.Αλεξίου (Αθήνα: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1986).
---, Kotànyi, Vaneigem, «Sur la commune», Internationale Situationniste,12(1969).www.acontrecourant.org/acc2/index.php?page=commune.
O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986).
Docherty J.Linda, “Model families: The domesticated Studio Pictures of William Merritt Chase and Edmund Tarbell”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):48-64.
---, Theorising Modernism, Visual art and the Critical Tradition, (Νέα Υόρκη: Columbia University Press, 1994).
De Duve, Thierry, “Ex Situ”, LES CAHIERS du Musée National d’art Moderne 27 (φθινόπωρο 1989) : 39-55.
---, Kant After Duchamp, (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: 1996).
Eisenman, Peter D., "Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition." Design Quarterly 78-79 (1970): 1-5.
Efrat, Zvi, Fausch, Deborah, Singley, Paulette, El-Khoury, Rodolphe, (επιμ) Architecture: In Fashion (Νέα Υόρκη: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).
Etincelle, Carnet d'un mondain, vol. I, (Paris: Rouveyre, 1881-82).
Krzysztof Fijalkowski “‘ Un salon au fond d’un lac’, The domestic spaces of surrealism” στο Mical, Thomas (επιμ.) Surrealism and architecture, (London : Routledge, 2005):11-30
Facos Michelle, “The Ideal Swedish Home :Carl Larsson’s Lilla Hyttnas”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):81-91.
Farquharson, Alex, «Drastic Plastic», Frieze 68 (2001).
Focillon, Henri, Η ζωή των μορφών, μτφ. Α. Κούρι, (Αθήνα : Νεφέλη, 1982).
Foster, Hal, “The Archive without Museums”, October 77, (Kαλοκαίρι 1996) : 97-119.
---, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002).
---, Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (Λονδίνο και Νέα Υόρκη: Verso, 2002).
Francis, Mark, «Tune in, turn on, light up..» Tate etc. αρ.4, www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/summeroflove.htm
Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood”, Art Forum, Vol.V, αρ.10 (καλοκαίρι 1967): 13-23.
Frizot Michel, Dominique Paini, Sculpter photographier photographie sculpture (Παρίσι: Marval, 1991).
Frechuret, Maurice, Le mou et ses formes :essai sur quelques catégories de la sculpture, (Παρίσι: ESBA, 1993).
Geiger, John, Chapel of Extreme Experience: a Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Νέα Υόρκη: Soft Skull Press, 2004).
Giedon, Sigfried, Space, time and Architecture : The Growth of a new Tradition, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941).
Gintz, Claude, “Architecture et postminimalisme”. Revue d’esthétique 29 (1996).
Giovanni, Antonucci, Chonache del theatro futurista, (Roma: Abete, 1975).
Godin, Christian, La Totalité realisée, Les arts at la littérature (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1997).
Gray Noel, «The kaleidoscope: Shake, Rattle and Roll”, The Australian Journal of Media&Culture, αρ.6(1991)www. mcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/6.2/Gray.html
Greenberg, Clement, Recentness of sculpture, American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, 1967).
Greenberg, R., Ferguson, B. W., Nairne, S., (επιμ.), Thinking About Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Girst, Thomas ”Those objects of Obscure Desires :Marcel Duchamp and his Shop Windows στο Grunenberg, Christoph, Hollein Max (επιμ.), Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Schirn Kunstahalle Frankfurt και Tate Liverpool( Frankfurt , Liverpool :Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2002).
Grunenberg, Chrιstoph, Harris, Jonathan, (επιμέλεια), Summer of Love, psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 60’s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press +Tate Liverpool, 2005).
Hahn, Till, “L’amour du verre”, Museum 172 (1991) : 202-205
Hoffmann, Gerhard, "Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe," Poe Studies XII, αρ.1 (Ιούνιος 1979) www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1979101.htm
Hainard, Jacques, Kaehr, Roland, Objects Prétextes, Objects Manipulés (Neuchâtel: Musée d’ethnographie, 1984).
Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, (επιμ.), Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Cambridge: Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992).
Hergott, Fabrice, «Plight», Joseph Beuys. (Paris: Musee national d’art moderne: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994).
Highmore, Ben, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, (Λονδίνο: Routledge, 2002).
Hirst, Paul, “Foucault and Architecture”, AA Files 26 (1993) : 25-60.
Hirst, Lisa, “Dressing the part, Workwear for the Home 1953-1965”, Things 9 (Xειμώνας 98-99): 25-49.
Hulten, Pontus (επιμ.) Futurismo & Futuristi (Milano: Fabbri Bompiani, 1986).
Jones, Amelia, Irrational Modernism, a Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2004)
Jones, Jonathan, A House is not a Home, Frieze 55, (νοεμ -δεκ 2000 ) :84-89.
---, "Species of Spaces -Mike Nelson. Frieze 53, (Kαλοκαίρι 2000).
Joselit, David, Infinite Regress, Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003).
Judd, Donald, “Specific objects” Arts Yearbook 8. (1965) : 74-82
Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, μτφρ. Catherine Porter. (Νέα Υόρκη: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Kabakov, Ilya, On the total installation (Bonn: Cantz verlag, 1995).
------, Tupitsyn, Margarita, Tupitsyn, Victor, “Conversation About Installation”, Art Journal 58, αρ. 4, (χειμώνας 99): 62–73.
Kachur, Lewis, Displaying the Marvelous, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).
Klimasmith, Betsy. At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005 ) , ειδικα τα κεφ. the “Tenement home” και “The Apartment as Utopia”.
Κοτιώνης, Ζήσης. Πες, πού είναι η Αθήνα. Προβολές στην τοπογραφία της Αττικής (Αθήνα : Άγρα, 2006).
Kiaer, Christina, Imagine no Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism(Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2005).
Kiaer, Christina, « The Short life of the Equal Woman », 2009, Tate ETC Magazine, www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue15/russian.htm
Krauss, Eva, «Plaidoyer pour une archisculpture » L’architecture d’aujourd’ hui, 349 (Νοεμ-Δεκ. 2003): 58-63
Krauss, Rosalind. E., The Originality of the Avant–Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 1986).
---, Passages in Modern Sculpture,(Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1977).
Kwinter, Sanford, “Virtual City , or the Wiring and Waning of the World”, Assemblage 29, (Απρίλιος 1996) : 86-101.
----, Architectures of Time, Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2001)
Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (Νέα Υόρκη: Harper & Row 1971)
Leigh, Christian, “Home is where the heart is”, Flash art 145, (Μάρτιος-Απρίλιος 89).
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laokoon: Oder uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, (Βερολίνο :1766).
Loos, Adolf, Spoken into the Void, Collected Essays 1897-1900, μτφ. Jane O. Newman και John H. Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982).
Λοϊζίδη, Νίκη, Απόγειο και κρίση της πρωτοποριακής ιδεολογίας ( Αθήνα: Νεφέλη, 1992).
Lippard, Lucy, Pop Art (Λονδίνο : Thames and Hudson, 1966).
Giovani Lista , ‘Εναέρια Άποψη και φουτουριστική Αεροζωγραφική: Μια μεταφυσική του χώρου» στο Η κατάκτηση του αέρα , (Θεσσαλονίκη:ΚΜΣΤ, 2003):89-115
Lyotard, J.F. “Les immateriaux”, Art & Text 17 (1985).
Mahon, Alyce “Displaying the Body, Surrealism’s Geography of Pleasure” στο Wood, Ghislaine (επιμ.) Surreal Things, Surrealism and Design (London : Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007).
Mahoney, Robert, “La révolte des objets: John Armleder et un postmortem moderne”, Artstudio 19 (Χειμώνας 1990) : 78-89.
Μαρινέττι, Μανιφέστα του Φουτουρισμού (Αθήνα: Αιγόκερος, 1987).
Massey, Ann, “The Emergence of Interior Decoration as a Profession”, Interior Design of the 20th Century, (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1990).
Meleaf, Janine, "The House that Carrie Built: The Stettheimer Doll's House of the 1920s". Art & Design 51 (Νοεμβριος 1996) : 76-81.
Mehgham, Rod, "Inner Visions", Tate Magazine, issue 23, (2000):38-42.
Moholy–Nagy, Laszlo, Painting, Photography, Film, μετ. J. Seligman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1969).
Michelson, Annette, “Where is your rupture?” Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk” , October 56 (Καλοκαίρι 1991): 43–63.
Ντε Μικέλι, Μ. Οι πρωτοπορίες της τέχνης του εικοστού αιώνα (Αθήνα: Οδυσσέας, 1983).
Morris, Frances, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, (Λονδίνο: Tate Gallery, 1993).
Morton Pat, "A visit to Womenhouse", Architecture of the Everyday, (επιμ.) Steven Harris, Deborah Berke (Νέα Υόρκη : Princeton Architectural Press, 1997): 166-179.
Miessen, Markus, “Wondering through the chasms of opportunity”, Contemporary 21, αρ. 87 (2006): 16-17.
Millet, Catherine, “Architectures de Dubuffet”, Art Press 45 (1981) : 33-37.
Mulholland, Neil, “Use your illusions”, Tate etc. αρ.4 , (Καλοκαίρι, 2005). www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/summeroflove2.htm
McNeil, Peter "Designing Women : Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Designer, c 1890-1940 Art History 17, αρ. 4, (34), (Δεκέμβριος 1994) : 631-57.
Nevins, Deborah, "The Triumph of Flora: Women and American Landscape, 1890-1935, Antiques 127 (Απρίλιος 1985) : 64-69.
Niderst, Alain, "Esthetique et materialisme a la fin du siecle", Dix-Huitieme Siecle, αρ. 24 (1992) :189-197.
Ørskou, Gitte, « Inside the Spectacle, Olafur Eliasson. Minding the world», ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004).
Ottmann, Klaus, “Jessica Stockholder”. The Journal of Contemporary Art 5 (Aνοιξη/Kαλοκαίρι 1991) : 100-107.
Παπανικολάου Mιλτιάδης (επιμ.), Πίσω από το μαύρο τετράγωνο (Θεσσαλονίκη : ΚΜΣΤ, 2002).
Parent Beatrice, «Mario Merz: Le soufle de la liberté». Artstudio 13 : 52-63.
Pollock , Griselda, « On Mary Cassatt’s reading le figaro or the case of the missing women » στο Looking back to the future eesays on art, life and death ( Amsterdam:G+B Arts International , 2001):227-273
Piano, Renzo, “Atelier Brancusi a Parigi” Ottagono 124 (Οκτώβριος 1997).
Read, Herbert, Ιστορία της Μοντέρνας γλυπτικής, μτφρ. Μ.Λαμπράκη-Πλάκα (Υποδομή, Αθήνα, 1974).
Reed, Chistopher, "Domestic Strife". Tate Modern 21 (2000) : 51-54.
Revel, Judith, “L’archive au present: pour une généalogie de l’infime”. Οmnibus, ειδικό τεύχος για Documenta X, (Οκτώβριος 97).
Romain, Antoinette Le Normand, Rodin en 1900: l'exposition de l'Alma (Παρίσι : Musée du Luxembourg, Musée Rodin, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001).
Robinson, Joyce Henri « Hi Honey, I’m Home» : Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic » Not At Home (επιμ.) Christopher Reed (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1989) :98-112
Rosenthall, Mark, Installation Art, From Duchamp to Holzer (Munich : Prestel verlag, 2003).
Rossler, Beate, Privacies (Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2004).
Riley, Richard, «Μεταμόρφωση: νέες μορφές στη βρετανική τέχνη 1957-1971», στο Μεταμόρφωση, Βρετανική τέχνη της δεκαετίας του 60, (Άνδρος: Iδρυμα Βασίλη και Ελίζας Γουλανδρή, Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, 2005).
Sadler, Simon, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: ΜΙΤ Press, 1998).
Shapiro, Miriam, "Recalling Womanhouse". Women's Studies Quaterly 15 (Άνοιξη,/Καλοκαίρι, 1987): 25-30.
--- " The Education of Women as Artists :Project Womanhouse". Art Journal 31 (Άνοιξη 1972): 268-270.
Shapiro, Laura, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Νέα Υόρκη: The Viking Press, 2004
Shelley, Rice, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Dern, Cindy Sherman, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999)
Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust A History of Walking (Λονδίνο: Verso, 2001).
Spigel, Lynn, “The suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America,”
---, “Installing the television set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space 1948-1955”. Camera Obscura 16 (Μάρτιος 1988) : 11-48
Staniszewski, Mary Anne, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998)
Stephen Philips “Introjection and Projection : Frederick Kiesler and his dream machine” στο Mical, Thomas (επιμ.) Surrealism and architecture, (London : Routledge, 2005):140-155
Stewart, Susan, On longing, narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)
Sykora, Katharina “Merchandise Temptress : The surrealist Enticements of the Display Window” στο Grunenberg, Chrιstoph, Hollein Max (επιμ.), Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Schirn Kunstahalle Frankfurt και Tate Liverpool (Frankfurt , Liverpool :Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2002) .
Tabart, Marielle, Monod-Fontaine, Isabelle, Brancusi Photographe (Παρίσι : M.N.A.M, Centre G.Pompidou , 1979).
Taylor, Brandon, The Art of Today, (Λονδίνο: Everyman Art Library,1995).
Tiersten, Lisa, "The Chic Interior and the Feminine Modern: Home decorating as High Art in Turn-of-the Century Paris”, Not At Home, (επιμ) C.Reed, (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989):18-32.
Τροβά, Βασω (επιμ.), Από ποια πλευρά του τοίχου ; Ζητήματα φύλων στο σχεδιασμό του Χώρου (Βόλος: Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας, 2008).
Τουρνικιώτης, Παναγιώτης, Ιστοριογραφία της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής (Αθήνα: Αλεξάνδρεια, 2002).
---------, «Τα μνημεία και τ’αυτοκίνητα στο Vers une architecture του Le Corbusier», Χρονικά Αισθητικής, τομ.37-38 (1997-1998):85-98.
---------, “Ιδεαλισμός και ορθολογισμός, η αντίληψη της αρχιτεκτονικής του le Corbusier” , Δελτίο Συλλόγου Αρχιτεκτόνων, αρ. 16 (Ιανουάριος –Φεβρουάριος 1988):43-47.
Tsutsui, William, Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of The King of Monsters (Λονδίνο : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Umbro, Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (Λονδίνο: Thames and Hudson, 1973).
Van Zeijl, Gerard, The Architecture of Dwelling : A History of a(ir)rationality Bulwark, Dwelling as Figure of Thought, (επιμέλεια Hans Cornelissen) (Amsterdam : SUN, 2005): 103-129.
Vidler, Antony, The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).
---, Warped Space: Art Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2000).
---, “Splitting the difference”. Artforum, (Ιουν.2003) : 35-36.
Wakefield, Neville «Yucatan is Elsewhere, On Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque». Parkett 43 (1995) : 133
Weil, B., “Remarks on Installations and Changes in Time Dimensions”, Flash Art 162 Vol. XXV (Ιανούαριος/Φεβρουάριος 1992) : 104-109
Whiting, Cecile, A Taste for Pop,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Widdis, Emma, Visions of a New Land, (New Haven και Λονδίνο:Yale University, 2003).
Ghislaine Wood, ”The Illusory Interior” στο Wood, Ghislaine (επιμ.) Surreal Things, Surrealism and Design (London : Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007):39-57.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
A Cowboy's Sweetheart
When Patsy montana appeared in the Gene Autry feature film Colorado Sunset in 1939,
she had already gained fame from her million-selling hit, " i want to be a Cowboy's Sweetheart"javascript:void(0)
Collaboration Piece
Andrew Schoultz, Mark Mulroney, Chris Ballantyne. 2009. Collaboration Piece, Acrylic on Wood Panel
Andrew Schoultz, Mark Mulroney, Chris Ballantyne. 2009. Collaboration Piece, Acrylic on Wood Panel
Park Life Gallery
San Francisco
September 4–October 11, 2009
House at Limnos
Δημήτρης Φατούρος/Dimitirs Fatouros
House at Limnos /κατοικια στη Λίμνο
Οι νέες πραγματικότητες και η συνεχής αναζήτηση
New realities and unceasing investigation
30/09/2009 - 01/11/2009
Benaki Museum,Athens
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Αλλοι τρόποι
με τέτοιους τρόπους κερδίζεται η αιωνιότητα
Παπατσώνης
Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Το αεράκι ν' αφήσεις να φυσήξει την κάφτρα
Της στιγμής, που κοιτάς και σε κοιτάζει η αράχνη
Και σύγκορμος ένστιχτο σημαντικός ενώπιον της αμφιβολίας
Δρέπεις από κάθε λογής κήπο ταχέως τέλεια φυτά
Που τα κρατεί ορθά η ανθοφορία
Αλλος τρόπος η θέα ο καταρράκτης το πηγαινέλα
Των φθινοπωρινών κυμάτων στα ύφαλα των διαβατών
Το πηγαινέλα επίσης του γεγονότος του θανάτου ή της γεν-
νήσεως
Που λειαίνεται σε κάθε ταλάντευση
Και κάποτε απαράλλαχτο με την πραγματικότητα πάνω του
καθρεφτίζει το καθετί:
Ενα ρολόι φαγωμένο από τους χτύπους του
Βράχια και μάτια ονειρόπλεχτα με αλμύρες και με ανάσες
Και δυσκολίες να εκφραστεί η επαφή και η ένωση
Που βαραίνει το μέτρημα του υπολοίπου ή περισσεύματος
της ζωής
Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Της σιγής ο απόηχος να σου καίει το άσπρο πλάσμα που το
μάζευες αιώνες
Να το ξαναμαζέψεις
Αλλος τρόπος είναι να κρύψεις στον αντικρινό σου
Ο,τι δια της πυράς και δια της τέφρας άστραψε
Σε σπηλιά και ουρανό.
Δημήτρης Παπαδίτσας
Παπατσώνης
Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Το αεράκι ν' αφήσεις να φυσήξει την κάφτρα
Της στιγμής, που κοιτάς και σε κοιτάζει η αράχνη
Και σύγκορμος ένστιχτο σημαντικός ενώπιον της αμφιβολίας
Δρέπεις από κάθε λογής κήπο ταχέως τέλεια φυτά
Που τα κρατεί ορθά η ανθοφορία
Αλλος τρόπος η θέα ο καταρράκτης το πηγαινέλα
Των φθινοπωρινών κυμάτων στα ύφαλα των διαβατών
Το πηγαινέλα επίσης του γεγονότος του θανάτου ή της γεν-
νήσεως
Που λειαίνεται σε κάθε ταλάντευση
Και κάποτε απαράλλαχτο με την πραγματικότητα πάνω του
καθρεφτίζει το καθετί:
Ενα ρολόι φαγωμένο από τους χτύπους του
Βράχια και μάτια ονειρόπλεχτα με αλμύρες και με ανάσες
Και δυσκολίες να εκφραστεί η επαφή και η ένωση
Που βαραίνει το μέτρημα του υπολοίπου ή περισσεύματος
της ζωής
Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Της σιγής ο απόηχος να σου καίει το άσπρο πλάσμα που το
μάζευες αιώνες
Να το ξαναμαζέψεις
Αλλος τρόπος είναι να κρύψεις στον αντικρινό σου
Ο,τι δια της πυράς και δια της τέφρας άστραψε
Σε σπηλιά και ουρανό.
Δημήτρης Παπαδίτσας
Armchairs with Lions
Empire period, circa 1805.
Material : mahogany and mahogany veneer ; painted wood imitating
antique green patinated bronze ; chased ormolu ; metal.
Source: www.galerieperrin.com
The Short Life of the Equal Woman
Gustav Klucis's poster 'Young People - To The Aeroplanes' (1934)
Courtesy David King
Lili Brik on the cover of poetry anthology 'About This', designed by Alexander Rodchenko (1923)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow
Liubov Popova's 'Production Clothing for Actor no.5' in Fernand Crommelynck's play 'The magnanimous Cuckold' (1921) Gouache, Indian ink and collage on paper
Private Collection, Moscow
Maria Bri-Bein's poster "Hail the equal woman of the USSR" (1939)
Courtesy Christina Kiaer
Maria Bri-Bein
Female Telegraph Operators 1933
Courtesy Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Christina Kiaer on Russian Female Artists
The great generation of women artists of the Russian avant-garde, including Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Aleksandra Ekster, Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, is by now relatively well known, as is its largely gender egalitarian, or at least gender neutral, abstract imagery. But we know much less about women artists of the 1930s under Stalin. Work from this decade is most often simply dismissed as “Socialist Realism” or “propaganda art”, yet many worked in modernist figurative styles, and saw themselves as every bit as revolutionary as the previous generation. Like their Constructivist forebears Stepanova and Popova, they continued to produce exhilarating images of emancipated Soviet women well into the 1930s, until the state ideology of woman reverted to a more traditional, feminine and maternal model of limited equality.
Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova in their studio (1922). Photograph attributed to Mikhail Kaufman
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow
Take, for example, Popova’s famous costume designs for Fernand Crommelynck’s avant-garde play The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). The actors all wore prozodezhda, or “production clothing”, in keeping with the Constructivist programme of 1921, which called for artists to abandon painting and enter instead into Soviet mass-media and mass-production as “artist-engineers” or “productivists”. Popova’s Production Clothing for Actor no. 5 (1921) shows a costume for a female actor: a plain blue dress in the style of workers’ overalls with a big black apron – all rectangles and straight lines, forms derived from her earlier Suprematist-style painting. This costume barely differed from those of the male actors. As Popova herself put it, she had “a fundamental disinclination to making any distinction between the men’s and women’s costumes; it just came down to changing the pants to a skirt”. Her bold, consciously androgynous design is as good an icon as any for the new Soviet woman emancipated by Bolshevism, shedding the trappings of bourgeois femininity and becoming a productive worker equal to men.
Varvara Stepanova's poster for the play 'Through Red and White Glasses' staged by the Academy of Social Education (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow
We find a similarly androgynous, emancipated female costume in the agitational performance Through Red and White Glasses (1924), designed by Stepanova. On the lower left of her poster for this event, under the phrase “through red glasses” (ie, the world as seen by Bolsheviks), she drew three figures dressed in her prozodezhda costumes. The gender of the central, female figure is discernible only by the rounded line of her jaw and the slight fullness of her short hair. Their four anti-revolutionary white counterparts appear on the right side, dressed in upper-class clothes. Here the lone woman is strongly differentiated from the men, with round breasts, a tiny waist and wide hips. The female icon of those who see through red glasses is, again, a productive worker no longer confined by conventional signs of femininity. In 1939 another woman artist of the Russian revolution, albeit a far less famous one, also produced what was meant to be an iconic image of the equality of Soviet women: the poster “Hail the equal woman of the USSR”. Although Maria Bri-Bein had previously worked in a more angular, modernist style reminiscent of Popova and Stepanova, this poster depicts the woman in gently rounded forms, the belted pink sweater emphasising her bosom and hips. She demonstrates her equality by voting at the ballot box (in itself an arguable model of political action in the Soviet context), but otherwise – with her downcast head and bouquet of flowers – she represents a traditional model of demure and fecund femininity. She is closer in style to the anti-revolutionary “white” feminine form of Stepanova’s poster. How did this profound shift come about?
Varvara Stepanova's designs for the performance of 'An Evening of the Book' with the protagonists standing in front, photographed by Alexander Rodchenko (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow
Models and furniture for Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's play 'The Death of Tarelkin', designed by Varvara Stepanova (1922)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow
In the early 1920s, along with the Bolshevik campaign for the emancipation of women under socialism, the Constructivist refusal of conventional notions of artistic genius – traditionally associated with masculinity – and its rejection of the hierarchy between fine and utilitarian arts – women were more often linked with the latter – facilitated the unusual, widespread participation of women artists in the young Soviet art world. Popova and Stepanova, as we have seen, worked in costume and theatre design, but also designed mass-produced textiles, everyday clothing and propaganda posters, as well as producing mass-disseminated graphic works such as book and journal covers and advertisements. In 1923 Popova created her only propaganda poster based specifically on the theme of the emancipation of women – for the Bolsheviks’ so-called “battle against prostitution”. The slogan “Brother Worker Protect Your Sister from Prostitution” is blocked into a symmetrical arrangement of dynamic Constructivist horizontals, verticals and diagonals, and superimposed over hand-drawn figures (unusual in a Constructivist work) of a large “brother” in the centre and his proletarian “sisters” in the upper right corner, working in a factory and looking out beseechingly at the viewer.
Liubov Popova
Cover design for A Portfolio of Six Prints 1917-1919
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The next generation of women artists of the early 1930s would build on the achievement of the Constructivists in poster design, albeit with two major differences. First, many of them worked in the medium not because of Constructivist ideals of erasing the hierarchy of fine art over utilitarian art, but because the increasingly conservative and centrally administrated Soviet art system made the prestigious field of oil painting less accessible to women, who were always last in line for scarce studio space and supplies. Secondly, they concentrated on “women’s” themes not only out of commitment to the subject, but because they were often the only ones assigned to them within a still largely sexist institutional structure, in which male artists were given the “universal” poster topics. Valentina Kulagina, who had success in the early 1930s, is a transitional figure between the avant-garde women artists of the 1920s and their figurative counterparts of the 1930s. She had studied under the Constructivists in the 1920s and was married to the Constructivist Gustav Klucis, and she worked in poster design out of a continuing Constructivist commitment to the mass-dissemination of art – but also because she realised that the system would not support her if she attempted to practise in the fine arts. Her poster “International working women’s day is the fighting day of the proletariat” (1931) combines the Constructivist photomontage technique used exclusively by Klucis in his posters, on the right, with a monumental drawn figure of a fearless woman whose face appears hewn out of stone, on the left. Photographs of Soviet women in military uniform driving a tractor, working in a factory and laughing together float above a photo of a sexualised “flapper” flanked by two policemen, evoking the decadent bourgeois femininity and sexual violence of the West. As Kulagina’s diaries show, Klucis criticised her for using hand-drawn images in her work, because it departed from the avant-garde orthodoxy against any kind of figuration that was not photographic. Yet many modernist-inspired female artists of the early 1930s experimented with novel forms of figuration, attempting to develop a new kind of modern and realist art to convey the socialist ideal of a strong, equal woman no longer subject to the inequities and objectification faced by those in the capitalist West.
Ekaterina Zernova
Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank 1937
Courtesy Lubov State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSIZO, Moscow
Kulagina’s 1932 photomontage poster “Female shock workers of the factories and state farms, enter into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party” demonstrates the ease with which she moved back and forth between photomontage and figurative drawing in her work. For her, there was no absolute line of difference; she chose the imagery that would best convey her assigned theme. Here she places a giant picture of a kerchiefed peasant woman with upraised hand, presumably exhorting other female workers and farmers to join her as a Party member, on top of photos of smoking factories, tractors plowing fields andwomen marching. She was responding to the tricky assignment of presenting a positive image of the female collective farmer at precisely the most brutal moment of the Soviet government’s forced collectivisation of peasants. Because peasant women were particularly resistant to collectivisation, which destroyed centuries-old arrangements of domestic and religious life, the Bolsheviks made them the focus of their propaganda campaigns.
Valentina Kulagina, “International Working Women’s Day is the day of judging of socialist competition,” 1930. Courtesy of a private collection.
Valentina Kulagina, Female shockworkers strengthen the shock brigades, master technology, and increase the ranks of proletarian specialists (Rabotnitsy-udarnitsy, krepite udarnye brigady, ovladevaite tekhnikoi, uvelichivaite kadry proletarskikh spetsialistov), 1931
Unusually for this kind of propaganda, Kulagina chose a photograph of a woman who was not attractive for her central image. We know that she wanted to stress the seriousness of new Soviet women and their accomplishments, as a counterweight to their objectification, which persisted in the USSRin spite of the rhetoric of equality. In a diary entry of 1934, she complains that when she asked Klucis why he had chosen to foreground a photograph of a particularly pretty woman pilot in his aviation poster “Young people to the airplanes” (1934), he replied that he wanted to show that the pilot had “retained her femininity” in spite of her training and qualification. Kulagina writes: “And I’m thinking – but is that the purpose of the poster?” Of course it was not supposed to be the purpose of the poster, according to the ideals of women’s emancipation of the 1920s, and as illustrated in Constructivist and other images of strong women not bound by the traditional visual language of femininity.
A number of women poster artists of the early 1930s clearly sided with Kulagina when it came to making images of women. The accomplished figurative painter Ekaterina Zernova, who had been a member of the avant-garde painting group OSt (Society of Easel Painters) in the later 1920s, was one of the very few women who would achieve success as a painter within the Soviet art system of the 1930s. Her 1931 poster “The participation of women in socialist construction” offers an iconic image of the woman as a worker, rather than an object of visual pleasure: her face is schematically rendered and of medium attractiveness, while her body is encased in a jumpsuit that obliterates its contours. She is superimposed over smaller drawn images of the collectivised facilities of everyday life, mentioned in the poster’s long slogan, that will support her participation in productive labour: day care centres, nursery schools, public dining rooms and public laundry facilities. Zernova’s assignment would have been to produce an image fitting the slogan, so it was her choice to focus on the androgynous, uniformed and purposeful worker, rather than on the examples of everyday life (byt). Byt was considered a feminine sphere, and was therefore a less prestigious topic most often relegated to women poster artists. Zernova usually managed to avoid this kind of typecasting; she produced many works on industrial and military themes, and was particularly known for her intensely focused paintings and drawings of tanks. Maria Bri-Bein was assigned almost exclusively women’s topics for her posters, but she similarly avoided the stereotypically feminine themes of everyday life, producing instead, in the early 1930s, a striking body of images of steely, uniformed women capably performing various challenging tasks. Her 1934 poster “Woman worker and woman collective farm worker, master the technology of the sanitary defense of the USSR! Strengthen sanitary aviation!” presents a dashing female pilot in black leather and goggles, consulting with an equally square-jawed colleague as they prepare for a long-distance medical flight. Behind them, a group of women collective farmers and workers (one easily identifiable by her jumpsuit and wrench, as in the Zernova poster) is being instructed on the intricacies of the plane’s technology by a uniformed woman with an arm badge. Not only Bri-Bein’s feminist subject matter (fantastical as it no doubt was), but also her schematic, flattened visual language, have strong affinities with Kulagina and Zernova – even though she was a member of AKhR, a more conservative artistic group that favoured traditional realism. Even in her paintings, such as Female Telegraph Operators (1933), we see some of the modernist tendencies of her posters – the geometric blocking of space and almost purist depiction of technological gadgetry, as well as the loving attention to buttons, collars and straps on uniforms and the motif of women working together intimately. In fact, the gorgeously over-the-top butchness of the women in the aviation poster make them ripe for reclamation today as lesbian icons, whether or not (and most likely not) that was part of Bri-Bein’s original intention.
Liubov Popova
Painterly Architectonic 1918
Courtesy Nizhni Novgorod State Art Museum
The era of strong, skilled and unfeminine women in Soviet imagery began to draw to a close, however, in the mid-1930s. Stalin declared in 1935 that socialism had been achieved, and Soviet rhetoric shifted from the frenzied concentration on building up industrial production – including the participation of women in that process – to a new emphasis on an everyday life of cultured socialist consumption (kul’turnost), in which women would return to a more traditionally feminine role and appearance. They would be good mothers and wives, and they would be attractive. As the official Soviet women’s magazine Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker) put it in a 1937 article: “The Soviet woman… must learn to preserve her feminine countenance and to look after herself… she should pay attention to her appearance.” That same year, Zernova painted her large canvas Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank, in which the women – the younger one in a tight, fashionable skirt and sporting a big barrette in her hair – hold out bouquets of flowers to the approaching vehicle, while the men raise their hands in authoritative waves, much like the woman worker in her earlier poster. Even her favourite motif of the tank is all but obscured by the relentlessly fecund flowering trees and the Impressionist brushstrokes. And I have already mentioned Bri-Bein’s 1939 poster “Long live the equal woman of the USSR”, in which the solitary woman passively casting her vote for the Party line, again carrying a bouquet of flowers, replaces Bri-Bein’s earlier images of female camaraderie in skilled labour. The sad contrast between the docile womanliness of this figure and the bold, angular women of the aviation poster, bristling with authority in their caps and goggles and straps and buttons, signals the definitive demise of the artistic ideals and new iconic images of the women artists of the Russian revolution.
Text by Christina Kiaer
Source: Tate etc. magazine
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
